My Candlelight Novel

The house is a crumbling two-storey weatherboard place on tall stumps; it's a guest house, of the cheapest and shabbiest kind. But there is something magical and other-worldly about it. Because it's on the river, in that place where earth and water meet, it sits on a threshold, a margin, a place of change. And it was in this muddy, watery place where transformations are said to occur that I dreamed I might one day be transformed.

And so this is my story. It will be about birth and death and love and sex, and I will tell it very quiet and slow, so if you want big bangs of action and excitement it's best you stop reading right now.

I will make it something after my own heart, tender and dark, a little candlelight novel, started this late summer night as my lover and baby daughter sleep in the big bed in the corner, and my sister Kate leans thoughtful and sleepless against the railing of the dark verandah outside…