Coda

(Paperback)

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Description

Kathleen is facing old age alone. Between her selfish children - 'Brain' and his straying wife, and daughter Shamrock and Shamrock's hubby the 'Big Developer' - there is no longer a place for her. But Passing Downs Old People's Home is still not the place for a woman like Kathleen. She is not ready for that and they're not ready for her.

'I've skipped the grandma years,' Kathleen said. 'The four ages of women: bimbo, breeder, baby-sitter, burden . I've cut and run. Wasn't going to tell a soul but I've decided cutting and running is what it's all about.'

Thea Astley is at her most wickedly funny and pertinent in Coda. This brilliant satire on old age shimmers with grief and irony.

Praise for Coda: '[a] jewel of a book' - Jane Wheatley, HQ

'It is spiky and restless. daring and engaging-and inimitably Astley.' - Helen Elliott, Canberra Times

'Caustic, shrewd, witty, ironic, full of bright aplomb and jaunty ferocity . [Astley] had constructed a tricky satire halfway between farce and tragedy, a delicately balanced fiction.' - The New York Times Book Review

Author Bio

Thea Astley was born in Brisbane in 1925 and studied at the University of Queensland. She taught in schools in Queensland and New South Wales, then at Macquarie University in Sydney between 1968 and 1980.

The author of fourteen novels, two novellas and two short-story collections, she won the Miles Franklin Award four times, for The Well Dressed Explorer (1962), The Slow Natives (1965), The Acolyte (1972) and Drylands (2000), which was also nominated for the 2001 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow was nominated for the 1997 Miles Franklin Award, and in 1989 she was awarded the Patrick White Award for services to Australian literature. In 1992 she became an Officer in the Order of Australia, and received a special award at the 2002 NSW Premier's Literary Awards for lifetime achievement. She died in 2004.