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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'Luminous and deeply affecting, A Hundred Small Lessons is about the many small decisions - the invisible moments - that come to make a life. The intertwined lives of two women from different generations tell a rich and intimate story of how we feel what it is to be human, and how place can transform who we are. It takes account of what it means to be mother or daughter; father or son. It's a story of love, and of life...When Elsie Gormley falls and is forced to leave her Brisbane home of sixty-two years, Lucy Kiss and her family move in, with their new life - new house, new city, new baby. Lucy and her husband Ben are struggling to transform from adventurous lovers to new parents and seek to smooth the rough edges of their present with memories of their past as they try to discover their future selves...In her nearby nursing home, Elsie revisits the span of her life - the moments she can't bear to let go; the haunts to which she might yet return. Her memories of marriage, motherhood, love and death are intertwined with her old house, whose rooms seem to breathe Elsie's secrets into Lucy...Through one hot, wet Brisbane summer, seven lives - and two different slices of time - wind along with the flow of the river, as two families chart the ways in which we come, sudden and oblivious, into each other's stories, and the unexpected ripples that flow out from those chance encounters...' (Publication summary)
Notes
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Dedication: For Nigel Beebe, and for Hux
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Epigraph:
... the people we were
who said
or omitted to say
the appropriate words ...
The shapes we mistake
For ourselves
at the edge of the water.
John Burnside 'III De Libero arbitrio'
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Also large print.
- Also dyslexic edition
Works about this Work
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Love Letter to the Suburbs
2017
single work
essay
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 15 April 2017; (p. 19) '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. The sense of wonder increases when you learn that one of them does not work, and the other — scarcely less precariously — is a newspaper journalist.' (Introduction) -
'A Hundred Small Lessons' by Ashley Hay
2017
single work
essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , May no. 391 2017; 'A Hundred Small Lessons holds powerful truths, simply told. It is a story of parenthood and place, where small domestic moments, rather than dramatic public displays, are the links between people, the present and the past. Each moment occurs in and around a familiar, ordinary Brisbane house, and the book begins when Elsie, the nonagenarian resident, leaves this house for a nursing home, and Lucy and Ben move in with their son Tom.' (Introduction) -
Ashley Hay : A Hundred Small Lessons
2017
single work
essay
— Appears in: The Newtown Review of Books , May 2017; 'Ashley Hay’s new novel gives us warm, affectionate portraits of people and place in a story that shifts between past and present.'
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Ashley Hay : A Hundred Small Lessons
2017
single work
essay
— Appears in: The Newtown Review of Books , May 2017; 'Ashley Hay’s new novel gives us warm, affectionate portraits of people and place in a story that shifts between past and present.' -
'A Hundred Small Lessons' by Ashley Hay
2017
single work
essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , May no. 391 2017; 'A Hundred Small Lessons holds powerful truths, simply told. It is a story of parenthood and place, where small domestic moments, rather than dramatic public displays, are the links between people, the present and the past. Each moment occurs in and around a familiar, ordinary Brisbane house, and the book begins when Elsie, the nonagenarian resident, leaves this house for a nursing home, and Lucy and Ben move in with their son Tom.' (Introduction) -
Love Letter to the Suburbs
2017
single work
essay
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 15 April 2017; (p. 19) '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. The sense of wonder increases when you learn that one of them does not work, and the other — scarcely less precariously — is a newspaper journalist.' (Introduction)
Awards
- Brisbane, Queensland,