Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Biography, Literature & Literary studies

TRICK OF THE LIGHT

Laura Elvery

With a keen eye for detail and rich emotional insight, Laura Elvery reveals the fears and fantasies of everyday people searching for meaning. Ranging from tender poignancy to wry humour, this beguiling collection marks the debut of one of Australia's rising stars.

An art teacher sends four of her students on a guerrilla mission. A young runner struggles to make sense of his best friend's death. A health-food company adopts a farcical promotional strategy. A factory worker spends her days applying radioactive paint to watches, while dreaming of a future with her new suitor.

With a keen eye for detail and rich emotional insight, Laura Elvery reveals the fears and fantasies of everyday people searching for meaning. Ranging from tender poignancy to wry humour, this beguiling collection marks the debut of one of Australia's rising stars.

Laura Elvery is a writer from Brisbane. Her work has been published in The Big Issue Fiction Edition, Review of Australian Fiction, Kill Your Darlings and Griffith Review. She has won the Josephine Ulrick Prize for Literature and the Margaret River Short Story Competition, and was awarded a Griffith Review Fellowship. She has been shortlisted for the Overland NUW Fair Australia, Neilma Sidney and Victoria University Prizes. In 2016, Laura was shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards for an unpublished manuscript.

Available products
Book Published 2018-03-01 by UQP University of Queensland Press - St Lucia (AUS)
Book Published 2018-03-01 by UQP University of Queensland Press - St Lucia (AUS)

Comments

Elvery has a particular knack for getting into the heads of children and teenagers; her young characters are a compelling mix of naivety and recklessness, trusting of adults but constantly let down by them. Her adult characters are adrift but doing their best and remain hopeful to the end.Meticulously crafted... these are stories of subtle beauty and power.

Radiant, accomplished and exquisitely written, this is an outstanding collection.

Elvery has a talent for portraying the minutiae of characters' lives and then suddenly stripping the banal away, so that we are left staring at the bare bones of a life... Elvery's debut reads like a triumph of excavation - a collection in which dark matter is exposed and subsequently transformed... An intriguing and powerful new writer.

Laura Elvery's debut Trick of the Light introduces a genuine new talent to Australian literature. Her 24 stories contain vignettes as varied, poignant, funny and daring as anything I've encountered in years.

A complex emotional intimacy is present in all of Elvery's stories, but it's her inventive characters meeting original circumstances that makes Trick of the Light that rare thing: a page-turning short fiction collection.