AustLit

'At the heart of Gretchen Shirm’s novel Where the Light Falls is a meditation on silence, and art as of a means of speaking. The novel’s protagonist, Andrew Spruce, is an art photographer who sees “honesty in broken things” (298), choosing subjects that are damaged in some way: a fractured tea cup that has been glued back together, a grown man with a full set of baby teeth, a girl with a paralysed face. Through framing and capturing a broken subject, Andrew is able to transform it—a metaphor for integrating traumatic experiences into reality. Shirm writes, “A photograph could do this: it could make strangeness seem normal and transform it into a thing of beauty” (205). In this novel, the act of representing is ultimately a means of healing.' (Introduction)