Mar 6, 2017
She studies my face, holding both my hands in hers. How fast, after all this time, I remember what I loved about her.
Emily Bitto, the strays
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She studies my face, holding both my hands in hers. How fast, after all this time, I remember what I loved about her.
Emily Bitto, the strays
Emily Bitto's new novel is set in the overheated avant-garde art scene of Depression-era Melbourne, where two girls — conventional Lily and sharp-tongued, exotic Eva — form a complicated bond. Critic Jean Zimmerman says, “The Strays invites readers into a world that is by turns disturbing and magical.”
Read our book review here.
Photo: Claire Harbage/NPR
I wanted to love her without envy. To say to others, 'She is amazing. So beautiful and kind and clever.' But I could not. I could not say those things without wanting to convey something cruel beneath the words.
Emily Bitto, the strays
On her first day at a new school, Lily meets Eva, one o…
“When was it that I became a voyeur in their midst? I was the perfect witness, an unsuspected anthropologist disguised within the body of a young girl, surrounded by other young girls who were part of the family. Yet I was a cuckoo in the nest, an imposter who listened and observed, hoarding and collecting information.”
~ Emily Bitto, “The Strays”
“But that summer in the Trentham house I could see a different future, one that I felt I might belong in. I felt that I was no longer on the periphery of a life I imagined to exist somewhere out of reach, but that I had broken out of some brittle carapace and was unfurling in the sunlight. Around Evan and the other artists I was learning the habit of attention, of noticing the world in all its ravishing detail and complexity. The habit of being amazed. They told stories, looking at objects and people until they shook them clean of the dust of everyday and made them myth. On warm evenings we trailed around the garden after Helena, on her wanders with her five o'clock gin and tonic. She pointed out plants to us, teaching us their botanical names. Ugo, Jerome and Maria went to Broken Hill and out into the desert, and came back with sketches dominated by skies, trees, windmills and water tanks; by space and wind. They brought back watercolours drenched in reds and ochres. We all went camping to Timboon. We caught fish, sat around the campfire late into the night. We went night-swimming. The cool prickle of fear and exhilaration in the deep black water.”
~ Emily Bitto, “The Strays”
“I remember that day, after it all fell apart, when Eva came to me through the misty garden so that her red coat bled into view from white to pale rose to scarlet, the pride I felt. That I was the one she turned to. That I could give her what he own family could not. All those years as part of the Trenchan lives. Feeling loved, but never needed, never family. I am an only child; it is my lot to be envious, even grasping, to long for the bonds that tie sisters together, the fearless, unthinking acceptance that we are social creatures, pack animals, that there is never, truly, the threat of being alone.”
The Strays, Emily Bitto