Alone

A new edition of Beverley Farmer’s classic 1980 debut, out of print for many years. Alone captures the emergence of one of Australia’s most powerful and distinctive writers.

Set in Melbourne in the late 1950s, and taking place over the course of two days and nights, Alone chronicles a young woman’s hopelessness and obsession provoked by the ending of a passionate relationship. A fledgling writer, estranged from her family and a dropout from university, she recalls her desire for her female lover, and contemplates ending her life. As she travels through a city fallen into cultural and economic malaise, shadowed by the constant threat of sexual violence, she reflects on the days and months that have brought her to despair.

Beverley Farmer’s debut novel, based partly on her own experiences, captures the romantic intensity and ironic reversals of youthful longing. Alone displays Farmer’s remarkable capacity for bringing different forms of writing together, prose and poetry, dialogue and dramatic monologue, and shows the formation of an unmistakable, lyrical literary voice.

As she explores the frailty of emotional experience, Farmer places her characters in a luminous domain of elemental sensual experience.
Cassandra Pybus

Beverley Farmer’s expansive curiosity and regard for microcosmic significance sharpen a reader’s attention to all things lived, dreamed, and observed.
Josephine Rowe

Farmer’s fiction yields a strong sense of place, both geographical and emotional… Alone shows us even when we think we are alone, we can always take refuge in the idea of other people.
Vanessa Francesca, Sydney Morning Herald

Farmer’s beautifully striking prose, her use of jarring dialogue, and the moments of poetic stillness and imagined violence throughout the book bring Shirley’s youthful anguish and the Melbourne of yesteryear to life… Farmer’s prose consumes the reader; it is visceral and haunting. Shirley’s heartache, her fragile state and the weight of her wanting – now nearly 45 years later – is as powerful and as vital as it ever was.
Mandy Beaumont, The Big Issue (5-star review)

This remarkable debut novel, despite its years, is a relatable vignette of solitude, instability, passion and pain – a beautifully dark portal into an obsessive teenage mind, and well worth a revisit in this new, 2024 edition.
Ramona Magazine

About the Author

Beverley Farmer

Beverley Farmer (1941–2018) was the author of four collections of short stories, including Milk, which won the NSW Premier’s Award for Fiction, and A Body of Water, and the novels Alone, The Seal Woman and The House in the Light, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. This Water: Five Tales was longlisted for the 2018 Stella Prize. It was her last work of fiction.

Reviews