From the author of the bestselling Women in Black, an extraordinary novel about ordinary people.
MADELEINE ST JOHN was born in Sydney in 1941. Her father, Edward,
was a barrister and Liberal politician. Her mother, Sylvette,
committed suicide in 1954, when Madeleine was twelve. Her death,
she later said, ‘obviously changed everything’.
St John studied Arts at Sydney University, where her contemporaries
included Bruce Beresford, Germaine Greer, Clive James and Robert
Hughes. In 1965 she married Chris Tillam, a fellow student, and
they moved to the United States where they first attended Stanford
and later Cambridge.
From Cambridge, St John relocated to London in 1968 with the hope
that Chris would follow. The couple did not reunite and the
marriage ended. St John settled in Notting Hill. She worked at a
series of odd jobs, and then, in 1993, published her first novel,
The Women in Black, the only book she set in Australia. When her
third novel, The Essence of the Thing (1997), was shortlisted for
the Man Booker Prize, she became the first Australian woman to
receive this honour.
St John died in 2006. She had been so incensed after seeing errors
in a French edition of one of her novels that she stipulated in her
will that there were to be no more translations of her work.
‘Not much in the way of folly escapes Madeleine St John, and the
oubliette she opens into the darker reaches of the spirit is
unsettling.’
*The Times*
‘St John proves herself a comic, humane observer.’
*Newsday*
‘Madeleine St John is brilliant on the elliptical way lovers talk
to each other.’
*Daily Telegraph*
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