So This Is Life: Scenes from a Country Childhood

(Paperback)

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So This Is Life is a wonderfully evocative account of youth that will surely take its place among the classics of Australian childhood. At age seven, after her parents' marriage broke down, Anne Manne travelled with her mother and sisters from Adelaide to the Central Victorian countryside to begin a new life. So This Is Life is not a conventional memoir but a haunting and luminous account told through stories-unexpected moments of epiphany-where meaning, suddenly and sometimes shockingly, reveals itself. Possessing an astonishingly faithful and vivid memory of the pain, fear and joy of childhood; a sensibility keenly alive to the beauty of the landscape, the fellow-creatureliness of animals and the comedy, tragedy and dignity of the lives of the country folk she grew up among, So This Is Life shows a powerful moral vision being shaped, about the meaning of kindness, and the desolation of grief. It depicts worlds as far apart as the faded gentility of former goldfields wealth, and the patriarchal spivvery of the country racetrack. Full of inconsolable pain but also impish humour, these stories sparkle like gems.

Author Bio

Anne Manne is a writer and social commentator who has been a regular columnist for The Australian and The Age. Her essays on contemporary life regularly appear in The Monthly magazine. She is the author of Motherhood- How Should We Care for Our Children, which was a finalist in the Walkley Award for Best Non-Fiction Book in 2006, and the Quarterly Essay, 'Love and Money- The Family and the Free Market', published in 2008.