AustLit

'“In London, where Nina lived, it was the time of foxes.” So begins Australian author Jo Lennan’s book of short stories. But if In the Time of Foxes starts like a fairytale, it reads more like a treatise on the grittiness – the small disappointments, the big injustices, as well as the joys – of everyday life.'  (Introduction)

'Predator or prey? Jo Lennan’s debut collection of stories lures the reader into a world where foxes can mean many things.' (Introduction)

'In a 1954 letter to his niece Pippa, artist-nomad Ian Fairweather lamented that he could not write with sufficient analytic detachment to look back at his life and ‘see a pattern in it’. (Ian Fairweather: A life in letters, Text Publishing, 2019). The irony – that one of Australian art’s most profound, intuitive pattern-makers should be ruefully unable to ‘see’ the formative structures and repetitions of his fraught life – would not be lost on Amanda Lohrey. Labyrinth, her haunting new novel, is a meditation on fundamental patterns in nature and in familial relations, and our experience of them in time. But this is a novel, not a treatise, its narrative so bracing – like salt spray stinging your face – that one is borne forward inexorably, as if caught in the coastal rip that is one of the novel’s darker motifs. It is a work to read slowly, and reread, so that its metaphorical patterns can come into focus, and the intricate knots of structure loosen and unwind.'  (Introduction)