A Loving, Faithful Animal (Josephine Rowe, UQP)

Josephine Rowe’s first novel follows her acclaimed story collections How a Moth Becomes a Boat and Tarcutta Wake. Like her stories, A Loving, Faithful Animal distils the small incidents of ordinary life into moments of resonance and grace, but assuredly weaves them together across the longer form. Opening in the summer of 1991, the novel focuses on one family. Father Jack is haunted by his time in Vietnam, and the fury that simmers in him spills out onto his wife Evelyn, and daughters Lani and Ru. As she shifts through the voices of each family member, Rowe allows their individual stories to unspool over the years, revealing the lifelong impact of Jack’s violence and the ways in which war makes monsters of men. Frank depictions of domestic violence and its capacity for damage make for difficult reading, but Rowe’s lyrical writing—which is almost prose-poetry at times—is utterly compelling. The depiction of the PTSD suffered by returned soldiers echoes Chris Womersley’s Bereft, while the gothic Australian landscape and the slow unravelling of trauma recalls Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing. This is a striking and highly original novel for readers of Australian literary fiction.

Veronica Sullivan is the prize manager of the Stella Prize and online editor of Kill Your Darlings journal

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