Love letter to the suburbs
A Hundred Small Lessons By Ashley Hay Allen & Unwin, 384pp, $32.99 In this era of soaring house prices and desperate first-home buyers, it's very brave or very silly to centre a contemporary Australian novel on the concept of property ownership. Puzzlingly, the newly married couple of Ashle...
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| Published in | Weekend Australian |
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| Main Author | |
| Format | Newspaper Article |
| Language | English |
| Published |
Canberra, A.C.T
News Limited
15.04.2017
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| Subjects | |
| Online Access | Get full text |
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| Summary: | A Hundred Small Lessons By Ashley Hay Allen & Unwin, 384pp, $32.99 In this era of soaring house prices and desperate first-home buyers, it's very brave or very silly to centre a contemporary Australian novel on the concept of property ownership. Puzzlingly, the newly married couple of Ashley Hay's A Hundred Small Lessons purchase a large piece of riverside real estate without so much as mentioning the huge mortgage they have presumably signed up for. [...]her investment in the national literary tradition of exalting the white picket fence is surely forgivable, not least because the 1940s Queenslander around which her plot revolves brings to mind those wooden structures on stilts venerated by another Brisbane writer with property preoccupations, David Malouf. In her old age, Elsie has been relegated to a nursing facility because of failing health; her beloved weatherboard is now in the hands of newcomers with unimaginably different lives... |
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