Provenance

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

An evocative and engaging novel of love, loss and the collision of cultures. Growing up in an Italian family in 1950s Queensland, Rafaela longs to move to Melbourne and start her own life. When she finally seizes her chance, floodwaters halt her train's progress south, and a beautiful young Sikh scientist named Chanchal captures her heart. While both their families search for their wayward children, Rafi and Chanchal forge ahead with their life together, living briefly in isolation and bliss on a farm, unaware that their story is travelling ...Set against the stifling heat of the Queensland canefields, the lush farmland of northern New South Wales and the bustle of Melbourne in the early 1960s, Chanchal's and Rafi's stories unfold and intersect over the following years, as their chance encounter becomes a story of two countries on the cusp of modernity. Provenance is an accomplished and original novel that explores colour and cultural difference at a moment in India and Australia's post-Independence and post-war history when the West was keen, as one character puts it, to get on with the sexy part of the twentieth century.

Author Bio

After a tricky start with a bit of dyslexia and synthesesia Jane fell in love with reading and writing, and these have been her chief preocupations since she was in her teens. She now teaches creative writing at Macquarie University, and loves her work. In previous lives she's worked for a video production company, as a volunteer radio announcer, sold the Sun and the Mirror at Wynyard station on the street, picked fruit, packed in a factory, waitressed - all the (legal) things that aspiring young writers do. PROVENANCE is not autobiographical, but began with a sensual memory of Melbourne from Jane's childhood years there, and a fascination with questions about love, lies, India, long hair, mothering, art and science. She has a new novel underway, called 'The Happiness Project', a contemporary story set in Sydney; and a short story in production with the ABC's Radio National for broadcast in February 2007. Jane Messer: lives in Sydney with her husband and two children.