Vicki Hastrich
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Entirely new, entirely fresh, and profoundly captivating.
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Night FishingStingrays, Goya and the Singular Life
a memoir in essays Published by Allen & Unwin in September 2019, Night Fishing is a personal memoir on art and nature. It unfolds as a series of expeditions or essays, undertaken in the spirit of the philosopher scientist. All the while, slowly, thoughtfully, it reveals the ordinary and remarkable detail of a life.
'Loved this - a gentle, meditative surge, a memoir which never strays too far from that big collective unconscious, the sea. Here the sea is night-fear, is stumps in the water mistaken for doughty swimmers, is secrecy, is revelation. On the journey, there are pearls - a mother doings crosswords in an austere billiard table showroom, and also passing on the ocean of words to her daughter; the numbfish, a death harbinger; Galileo painting the waxing and waning of the moon as the world's water heaves from its pull; Dasayatis breivicaudata caught in the Garden Island graving dock, destined to glide out their graceful days in the Taronga Park Aquarium. And childhood, the most sparkling and scary sea of all.' @tomsbooks |
Commended in the FAW Christina Stead Award 2009
'...as airy, soaring and as magnificent as the bridge itself.'
Michelle de Kretser, author of The Lost Dog |
The Great Arch
In 1924 the planned and long-awaited Sydney Harbour Bridge represents an impossible ideal - to span the great waters of the harbour and take a war-scarred nation into a dazzling future. No one is more enthusiastic than Reverend Ralph Anderson Cage of Lavender Bay, whose imagination is seized by the scale of this thoroughly modern vision.
Inspired by true people and events, and as open and colossal as the bridge itself, Vicki Hastrich's deeply moving novel links two centuries, two world wars and two generations. By turns wickedly funny and breathtakingly poetic, this is the story of an ordinary man, and an ordinary life, made grand. |
'I gulped down The Great Arch in two long sittings, cancelling a coffee date because I didn't want to put it down. Hastrich had me hooked from the first pages...I feel like climbing the bridge and yelling out how good it is.'
Christos Tsiolkas, author of The Slap |
Swimming with the Jellyfish
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An unforgettable cast of characters fills the seaside town of Pocket Head, but one is missing. Lal's mother has mysteriously disappeared, leaving Lal and her father devastated and forever wondering why. Perhaps in the jumble of the oysterman's ancient beach shed is the secret that holds the town together.
Swimming with the Jellyfish pulls up the blinds in the sort of coastal town we've all driven through, holidayed in or lived in, revealing - with humour, originality and insight and, above all, love - lives as fascinating and eccentric as any in Dylan Thomas' Under Milkwood.
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