AustLit

'The Returns is something of a sequel to Salom’s Waiting (2017): both novels are set in a vividly evoked North Melbourne and both chart the evolving relationship of eccentric – if very differently classed – characters. The Returns cheekily acknowledges this connection when book-seller, Trevor, stares out of his shop and sees Waiting’s unforgettable Big and Little gazing straight back at him: Salom’s readers know who Big and Little are, and Trevor would too if he’d bother to read the copy of Waiting that resides on his shop’s shelves. Trevor is, of course, oblivious to the authorial joke he is sitting in. Overweight, about-to-bedivorced, limpy, and prone to gloom, this ‘mordant humourist’ (39) is too busy worrying about his post-marriage future. Then, Elizabeth appears. She is skinny, orthorexic, divorced, and a sufferer of prosopagnosia: she cannot recognise faces. She works-from-home as an editor and is looking for a lodger. Trevor soon moves in, befriends her equally limpy dog, takes over the cooking, and turns her shed into a studio: he wants to ‘fetch back’ his abandoned youth as a ‘wayward’ bachelor artist (59).' (Introduction)