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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 the writer’s notebook, A Body of Water. She was also the writer of the novels AloneThe Seal Woman and The House in the Light, this last title being shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. The Bone House, a collection of essays on the life of the body and the life of the mind, was published by Giramondo in 2005. This Water: Five Tales was longlisted for the 2018 Stella Prize. It was her last work of fiction.

Titles

Alone

Beverley Farmer

126 pages
Paperback, 21 x 14.8 cm
Published May 2024
ISBN 9781923106031

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.

A Body of Water

Beverley Farmer

368 pages
Paperback with flaps, 21 x 14.8 cm
Published October 2020
ISBN 9781925818253

This is a new edition of Beverley Farmer’s out-of-print classic A Body of Water, which in its mixing of genres – essay, memoir, fiction, folk tale – opened up new frontiers for Australian literature.

This Water

Five Tales

Beverley Farmer

276 pages
Paperback, 21 x 14.8 cm
Published June 2017
ISBN 9781925336313

This Water is the last work of fiction by Beverley Farmer, one of Australia’s great prose stylists, and a pioneer of women’s writing in this country. It is a collection of five interwoven tales, three of them novellas. Each has a woman at its centre: in each the women speak, act, think for themselves, in opposing or escaping from an oppressive authority.

The Bone House

Beverley Farmer

324 pages
Paperback, 19.7 x 13 cm
Published October 2005
ISBN 9781920882068

The three long essays that make up The Bone House are an extended meditation on the life of the body and the life of the mind, each based on a single theme and woven out of the same few elemental symbols of earth, and water, fire and blood, light and darkness.

What does art know that we do not? How does the image have such a hold on us all? Alongside the urge to grasp the world, to abstract and delve, is the urge to make our visions known, somehow to fix the moment in time in its fullness of meaning. In the essays, this hoard of moments takes the form of a mosaic, composed of myth, poetry and fable, of relics of the past, of explorations and illuminations and surface impressions. Set out like a commonplace book, they can be read in any sequence, or savoured for their detail.