A moving tale of grief, community and the possibility of starting over, by an award-winning Australian author.
Amanda Lohrey lives in Tasmania and writes fiction and non-fiction. She has taught at the University of Tasmania, the University of Technology Sydney and the University of Queensland. Amanda is a regular contributor to the Monthly magazine and a former senior fellow of the Australia Council’s Literature Board. She received the 2012 Patrick White Award. The Labyrinth (2021), her eighth work of fiction, won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, a Prime Minister’s Literary Award, a Tasmanian Literary Award and the Voss Literary Prize.
'Amanda Lohrey has always been a writer of uncompromising artistic
purpose who is never content for the novel to be mere
entertainment. She has an instinctive, if understated, sense of
form and an inimitable novelist's voice…The Labyrinth is shadowed
and haunted by strangeness. It is a novel in high realist mode that
also has romance elements, if only in the way it encompasses a
tragicomic mood and a certain formal audacity that brings to mind
the moodiness and restless shifts of late Shakespeare. The
Labyrinth has a gravity that outstares everything that may seem
grey or gaunt in a literary endeavour where autumn seems to sink to
midwinter. It is a work of considerable literary artistry.’
*Judges’ comments, Prime Minister’s Literary Awards 2021
(shortlisted)*
‘Amanda Lohrey is an author of exquisite subtlety and wry humour.
Her ability to draw out the quieter nuances of the human condition
is evidenced again in A Short History of Richard Kline, in which
she has crafted a male character of great depth.’
*Mercury*
'Amanda Lohrey might be described as a writer’s writer: proficient
in short and long form fiction and a veteran of the essay. Her
writing is the literature of ideas. Her new novel, The Labyrinth,
uses the idea of the labyrinth as its key organising principle,
containing echoes and repetitions throughout to weave together a
haunting narrative about loss and self-understanding…Lohrey’s
descriptions are elegant and transfixing…There is something
dreamlike about the novel.’
*Australian*
‘Extraordinarily vivid and compelling...a stunning and memorable
novella’
*Age on 'Vertigo'*
‘Hypnotic and beautiful, The Labyrinth forces us to reckon with how
our deepest bonds can inflict the most pain. Amid this coil of
darkness, however, is the novel’s unfailing light: that hope and
redemption are always found in art and creation.’
*Rebecca Starford*
‘ The Labyrinth is Amanda Lohrey’s wisest and most intimate novel
yet—luminous, full of sharp-edged beauty and illuminating questions
about how we should live our lives. It asks, most simply, how to
keep going in the wake of a disaster that has no neat ending. This
is a novel in which nothing is out of place—every word and image
resonates.’
*Julieanne Lamond*
‘Lohrey’s writing is excellent, and she mixes pastoral and gothic
tropes beautifully.’
*Books+Publishing*
‘A beautiful, brutal book that I experienced as both earthy and
unearthly. I loved it.’
*Laura McPhee-Browne*
‘Not a book to be analysed but a book to experience. It is
compelling, visceral and deeply moving…It is delicate yet strong.
Painful yet regenerative.’
*Fiona Place*
‘Iridescent...The Labyrinth is a nuanced and engrossing novel of
bread and bones broken, the trace and rack of violence, and threads
that lead the way out of exile.'
*Saturday Paper*
‘Lohrey’s writing ensures we invest in and understand a mother’s
intense need for forgiveness…I do believe that this novel is her
very best. It is perfectly balanced and completely masterful. Fans
of Alice Munro and Anne Tyler will rejoice in this kind of
Australian story.’
*Readings*
‘An unsteadying read of strength, love and brutality that is
provocatively inconclusive in its closing. Poetic and
enormous.’
*Better Read Than Dead*
‘Left me with a sense of clean, clear joyfulness and
creativity…it’s a book of ideas, but [Lohrey] delivers in terms of
offering revelations and some sort of hope through making
things’
*RN Bookshelf*
‘Beautiful…Quite possibly my favourite Lohrey…One can’t help but
think of We Need to Talk About Kevin…but this is far more subtle
and intimate.’
*Jaclyn Crupi*
'The Labyrinth is an impressive addition to Lohrey’s body of
fiction, which always has philosophical foundations for its warmly
human stories. Here the characters and ideas are deftly integrated
into a short novel of deep wisdom about nature and art, men and
women, motherhood and home...Elegant sentences move with the
mindful pace of footsteps on a pathway.'
*SMH/Age*
‘This is a book about being a parent, building or making…as
therapy, and the inability to be truly alone in today’s society…The
pace of the book reflects the contemplative nature of walking a
labyrinth, both the inner one and the physical one that mirrors
it.’
*Herald Sun*
‘A deeply meditative book…[Amanda Lohrey’s] writing here is
beautifully layered, rich in imagery and meaning, without ever
being laboured...The Labyrinth offers a pull towards the unknown
and a comfort in solitude. It is a sharply tuned novel, a sprawling
narrative that resists rigid expectations, instead allowing those
who inhabit the pages to surrender themselves to the mode of
“reversible destiny” that it is constructed around.'
*Guardian*
‘Haunting…A meditation on fundamental patterns in nature and in
familial relations…[with a] narrative so bracing—like salt spray
stinging your face—that one is borne forward inexorably…Taut,
deftly edited…The novel’s story is stark, unflinching—gothic
without contrivance…Summary does scant justice to the subtlety and
power of Lohrey’s writing…Every page of this densely populated
novel, with its incised landscape, shimmers.’
*Australian Book Review*
‘Amanda’s prose is low-key, unsentimental, economical. The tale
unfolds without fanfare but with deft strokes that have the power
of leaving some things unsaid…excellent reading for the days when
you are shut at home with not enough to do.’
*Warragul and Drouin Gazette*
‘This quietly cerebral, emotional and atmospheric story is a gift
of hope at a time when so many are struggling with seemingly
insurmountable challenges.’
*Good Reading*
‘[Lohrey’s] storytelling is masterful: honed to pleasing plainness
and assured in its measured tempo, her novels would take multiple
readings to unpick her craft, which is deft to the point of
invisibility at times.’
*Mercury*
'In this fine, sensory work Amanda Lohrey spirals imagination,
ideas and humanity into a refuge.’
*Joy Lawn, Paperbark Words*
‘Lohrey’s writing is typically supple and luminous, her spare
narrative counterpointed with vivid, detailed, often enigmatic
dreams. By the end…the reader [is ready] to go back and relish
again at leisure this author’s precise and shining prose.’
*Advertiser*
'The release of a new Amanda Lohrey novel is always a moment to
look forward to and The Labyrinth (Text) looks set to be one of her
most successful yet – mystical, earthed and beautifully told.’
*James Boyce, Age*
‘Fluid, dream-like…Lohrey’s novel is beautifully written and
compellingly personal.’
*Otago Daily Times*
'My novel of the year, full stop…A story told without a syllable of
excess sentiment or false feeling, yet which sails full square into
the mystic.’
*Geordie Williamson, Australian*
‘A fine novelist…Her expertise, observant eye and ear, and sense of
story are fully present.’
*Conversation*
'Lohrey brings all her skill to this compelling and contemplative
novel, which will linger in your mind long after you read the final
page.’
*Claire Nichols, ABC RN*
'Amanda Lohrey has always been a writer of uncompromising artistic
purpose who is never content for the novel to be mere
entertainment. She has an instinctive, if understated, sense of
form and an inimitable novelist's voice. The Labyrinth is the story
of a woman with a beloved son all but lost to her in jail. The way
in which she seeks a catharsis, and a solace, by creating a
labyrinth as a distraction is also an enactment, at once symbolic
and literal, of her mood. This is a novel of unusual gravity with a
deeply poignant background which is also a quest for some shape and
pattern that might give meaning to a life with a diminished
horizon. The protagonist's relationship with the eccentric East
European stonemason who gives form to her dream is at once exotic
and credible. The Labyrinth is shadowed and haunted by strangeness.
It is a novel in high realist mode that also has romance elements,
if only in the way it encompasses a tragicomic mood and a certain
formal audacity that brings to mind the moodiness and restless
shifts of late Shakespeare. The Labyrinth has a gravity that
outstares everything that may seem grey or gaunt in a literary
endeavour where autumn seems to sink to midwinter. It is a work of
considerable literary artistry.’
*Judges’ comments, 2021 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards*
‘Superb: thoughtful, socially astute, and engaged, in a most
sophisticated way, with literary form…Takes the gothic and remakes
it in a tough and tailor-made form for our time and our place.’
*Australian Book Review*
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