AustLit

'When my mind returns to Jessie Cole’s grief memoir Staying, her third book after the novels Darkness on the Edge of Town and Deeper Water, my thoughts flood with a lush green. It returns often, to the secluded Eden in northern New South Wales where Jessie and her baby brother, Jake, are born. Built by hippie parents searching for a different life, their haphazard house doesn’t intrude on the surrounding forest but evolves symbiotically, limbs tenderly entwined. “We all grew together, from nothing much to something,” writes Cole.' (Introduction)