From the Bookshelf of Melbourne Library Service…

[close] I chose this book purely on the basis of the title and then discovered that the title has nothing whatsoever to do with the content of the story!
Jen Craig has written a novella about walking, memory and writing. The narrator walks from Glebe to a central Sydney café to meet the sister of a childhood friend who passed away, who left behind a manuscript which Jen was asked to read, and didn't, but was then asked not to read and to return it so if course she read it then!
This led to her having what she called a breakthrough which we, the reader, understand to mean she has started to write again. It is meandering and digressive : while she walks, we enter the narrator’s entire world: life with family and neighbours, narrow misses with cars, her singular friendships, dinner conversations and work. We learn of her adolescent desire for maturity and acceptance through a brush with religion, her anorexia, the exercise of that power when she was powerless in every other aspect of her life.

I found I couldn't put it down! It is a very different style to what I am used to reading but quite brilliant in how the everyday reflections of a human mind are presented to us. It is a novel that spirals around the thought process, the writing process and the way we remember. It never really pauses for breath but keeps burbling on and I found that I just needed to keep reading. I couldn’t skim anything either as thoughts which begin in one place rarely ended there so you needed to read every word to make sense of it all, but once I got into the flow of it, it was kind of like listening to my own thoughts put down in print!

A really interesting read, ordinary and yet extraordinary, and a story you need to read in one sitting, but luckily it is only short at 130 pages.

I actually used to live in NSW, near the Blue Mountains, and the title refers to a sign leading to two places of possible interest to the traveller, two places which I know a little myself, but didn’t realise until I started reading the story what the title actually meant!

Anyway, I thought this was highly original in its style, it won’t be for everyone but it certainly impressed me!