Exploded View

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

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Description

Must a girl always be a part

How can she become a whole

In the late 1970s, in the forgotten outer suburbs, a girl has her hands in the engine of a Holden. A sinister new man has joined the family. He works as a mechanic and operates an unlicensed repair shop at the back of their block.

The family is under threat. The girl reads the Holden workshop manual for guidance. She resists the man with silence, then with sabotage. She fights him at the place where she believes his heart lives in the engine of the car.

Spare, poetic and intensely visual, Exploded View is the powerful new novel from the author of Everymans Rules for Scientific Living and Mateship with Birds one of Australias most celebrated writers and winner of the inaugural Stella Prize.

Reviews

Exploded View(is) a measured, poetic focus on the small details in nature, roads and relationships. * Arts Hub *
Exploded View has all the exhilaration of a revved-up Holden * Age *
This tense novel, held tightly with elegant restraint, is hard to read for the best possible reasons. It asks a lot of its reader, but it offers the most satisfying rewards. * Lifted Brow *
Superbly controlled, like dark, secret music rising from an abyss. * Helen Garner *
This is Tiffanys triumphher prose has the alert, truncated poetry of a preternatural wise childlyrical without being florid, clear-sighted by unhappy with that early knowledgeIts title might suggest splintering of focus, but the line drawn in Exploded View is unwavering, tragic, and heads straight down. * Monthly *
'Exploded View is an offbeat coming-of-age story...there is hardly a detail that does not reverberate beyond itself, evoke some deeper implication. * Australian Book Review *
This is a powerful book and cant be ignored. * Books + Publishing *
'An adolescent girls terrifying tale of family life; I have never read a novel like Exploded View. * Joan London *
Tiffany pulls off something remarkable here: erecting a narrative structure almost buckling under its own weight, but that ultimately holds up. Challenging and devastating, this is an important read. * Overland *
This is a very different novel to Tiffanys early booksThe language is glitter, angrier and focalised exquisitely through this girls perspective. * Australian *
Carrie Tiffanys third novelAs spare as a poem, as potent as a depth charge. * SA Weekend *
'Both poetic and relentlessly dark in tonewith not a word wasted. * Saturday Paper *
If youre a fan of Australian literature, this one is not to be missed. * AU Review *
The distinctive qualities that made her two previous novels so successfulan original perspective, odd characters, earthy languageemerge quickly fromExploded View, like wildflowers cracking through bitumen...Tiffany writes this portrait of a girl on the brink of womanhood with great subtlety[T]heres much to learn from this girl and from the compassion, power and beauty of the authors fine writing.' * Guardian *
The language shifts and soars * Sydney Morning Herald *
[A] densely interior novel, narrated in vignettes that are rhythmic, often poetic, sparse and compressed...Tiffanys control of [the novels] voice is masterful. It is thrilling, even exhilarating at times, to read. -- Fiona Wright * Sydney Review of Books *
An ending to make your jaw unhinge. * NZ Listener *

Author Bio

Carrie Tiffany was born in West Yorkshire and grew up in Western Australia. She spent her early twenties working as a park ranger in Central Australia. Her first novel, Everymans Rules for Scientific Living (2005), was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Guardian First Book Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and won the Dobbie Award and the WA Premiers Award for Fiction. Mateship with Birds (2011) was also shortlisted for many awards and won the inaugural Stella Prize and the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the NSW Premiers Literary Awards. Carries latest novel Exploded View (2019) won the University of Queensland Fiction Book Award in the 2019 Queensland Literary Awards. She lives and works in Melbourne.