A Quintessential Love Affair — Margaret Sutherland

Enjoy a collection of this New Zealand author's work during her years in Australia. Memoir, new short stories and reprints, and extracts from four Australian-set novels, form a sampler of her characteristic empathy, compassion and humour. Margaret Sutherland's characters live in an everyday world where they travel, work and earn. We know these men and women; they might be ourselves. In language described by Kirkus Reviews as graceful and eloquent, her writing leads us through the glories and reverses of human experience. In memoir, she reflects on themes of family bonds, of work and its value, of romantic love and death. The short stories explore the challenges of teenage years and youth, through maturity, late love, parting and death. Fantasy and dreams; love and loss; youth and the road to age â€" we have been there, we remember and we understand. Finally, brief backgrounds and extracts from her four recent novels provide a tantalising glimpse of further reading available to the lover of a good book.