Thunderhead (Miranda Darling, Scribe)

Set over one fever-pitched day of errand-running, child-rearing, appointment-hopping and dinner-party prep in the suburbs, Thunderhead is about Winona Dalloway’s desperate desire to be free of her domestic shackles and abusive husband. It’s a daring book, adopting the aesthetics of Deborah Levy with the velocity of a crime thriller and an off-kilter voice, deeply internal, darkly comic, clipped and Woolf-ish. Author Miranda Darling wears many hats and has worked as an international fashion model, poet and author, and a defence and anti-terrorism security expert. These experiences have been absorbed into Winona’s character—also a writer—who lived a huge and dynamic life until she didn’t anymore. To deal with the danger and injustice of this, she sets her mind to the ‘Transcendence Project’. On the surface, she is dutifully passive, pretty and pliable, yet her mind churns with imminent catastrophe as she reports from the frontline of her bourgeois hell. Darling regularly contributes to RUSSH magazine, and Thunderhead brims with magazine-style musings—all those dizzying top notes, that intertextuality, the style. It’s a strong, complex and self-aware voice, and it is the primary vehicle through which we gauge Winona’s resilience and determination. If The Catcher in the Rye were instead penned by a domestic violence survivor, it might read a little like Thunderhead. For fans of Melissa Broder, Elizabeth Hardwick and Edwina Preston.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Mel Fulton is a writer, editor, and host of Literati Glitterati on Triple R. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Books+Publishing pre-publication reviews are supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

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