Let's kick off the week with a giveaway! Thanks to the lovely people at the UK arm of Allen & Unwin, I have a set of two Alex Miller novels — Lovesong and Conditions of Faith — to send to one lucky reader.
Alex Miller is an Australian writer — not to be confused with Alex Miller, a Scottish football manager, or Andrew Miller, an English novelist.
At last count he had 10 novels and countless awards — including the Miles Franklin Literary Award (twice, for The Ancestor Game and Journey into Stone Country), the 1993 Commonwealth Writer's Prize and the 2010 Age Book of the Year Award — to his name.
Typically, I'd not really heard of him until after I left Australia, and by that time it was too late: his books have never been available in the UK.
But that has recently changed. Last year the UK arm of Allen & Unwin released Lovesong, first published in 2009, and Conditions of Faith, first published in 2000. (Later this year it will publish Autumn Laing, which was released in Australia last year.)
Here's a synopsis of Conditions of Faith:
"With university behind her, Emily Stanton finds herself on the threshold of life. Introduced to a Scottish engineer, the exoticism of his life in Paris beckons, and she leaves her family home in 1920s Melbourne to become his wife. But far from providing answers, her conventional marriage awakens in her an ardent desire to find a reason for living beyond that of simply wife and mother. This desire leads her to flirt with risk, passion and unorthodox friendships, and carries her to Tunisia on a journey of self-questioning and intellectual reawakening.
"Conditions of Faith is both a provocative romance and an elegant meditation on a timeless dilemma. Impetuous yet entirely sympathetic, Emily Stanton, like Henry James' Isabel Archer, is in search of a reason for living in a society where motherhood is deemed reason enough. This mesmerising and thought-provoking story of dreams, obsessions and destiny will hold you in thrall."
And here's one for Lovesong (or you can read my review):
"Strangers did not, as a rule, find their way to Chez Dom, a small, rundown Tunisian café on Paris's distant fringes run by the widow Houria and her young niece, Sabiha. But when one day a lost Australian tourist, John Patterner, seeks shelter in the cafe from a sudden Parisian rainstorm, a love story starts to unfold. John and Sabiha's becomes a contented but unlikely marriage-a marriage of two cultures lived in a third-and yet because they are essentially foreigners to each other, their love story sets in train an irrevocable course of tragic events.
"Years later, living a small, quiet life in suburban Melbourne, what happened to them in Paris seems like a distant, troubling dream to John. He confides the story behind their seemingly ordinary lives to Ken, an ageing, melancholic writer who sees in his neighbours the possibility of one last simple love story.
"Told with Miller's distinctive clarity, intelligence and compassion, Lovesong is a pitch-perfect novel, a tender and enthralling story about the intimate lives of ordinary people. Like the truly great novelist he is, Miller locates the heart of his story in the moral frailties and secret passions of his all-too-human characters."
To be in with a chance of winning both books simply leave a comment below by 10.00 GMT on Thursday January 19, 2012.
I'll then choose the winner using an online random number generator (or some such).
The giveaway is open to anyone, regardless of where you live (if an international winner is chosen, the books will be sent surface mail), but you can only enter once. And do note, I cannot accept email entries. Good luck.
