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A Constant Hum
Before the bushfires—before the front of flames comes roaring over the hills—the ridges are thick with gums.
After the fires, the birds have gone. There is only grey ash and melted metal, the blackened husks of cars.
And the lost people: in temporary accommodation on the outskirts of the city, on the TV news in borrowed clothes, or remembered in flyers on a cafe wall.
A Constant Hum grapples with the aftermath of disaster with an eye for telling detail. Some of these stories cut to the bone; others are empathetic stories of survival, even hope.
All are gripping and beautifully written, heralding the arrival of an important new voice in literary fiction.
After the fires, the birds have gone. There is only grey ash and melted metal, the blackened husks of cars.
And the lost people: in temporary accommodation on the outskirts of the city, on the TV news in borrowed clothes, or remembered in flyers on a cafe wall.
A Constant Hum grapples with the aftermath of disaster with an eye for telling detail. Some of these stories cut to the bone; others are empathetic stories of survival, even hope.
All are gripping and beautifully written, heralding the arrival of an important new voice in literary fiction.
240 pages, Paperback
First published July 2, 2019
27 people are currently reading
1,321 people want to read
About the author
Alice Bishop
9Ìýbooks49ÌýfollowersAlice Bishop was born in 1986 and grew up in Christmas Hills, Victoria, Australia.
A Constant Hum, her first collection of short fiction, initially began as a response to her experience of the Black Saturday bushfires of 2009.
Her broader work has also been shortlisted for Aesop / The Saturday Paper's Horne Prize, received the Melbourne Lord Mayor's Prize for Fiction and has been recognised in the 2018 Penguin Prize for Literary Fiction.
She lives in Melbourne.
A Constant Hum, her first collection of short fiction, initially began as a response to her experience of the Black Saturday bushfires of 2009.
Her broader work has also been shortlisted for Aesop / The Saturday Paper's Horne Prize, received the Melbourne Lord Mayor's Prize for Fiction and has been recognised in the 2018 Penguin Prize for Literary Fiction.
She lives in Melbourne.
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 107 reviews
July 14, 2019
A mesmerising, heart-rending, vivid collection about the Black Saturday fires. Just stunning - one of the best and most powerful things I've read this year. Bishop combines traditional short stories with fragments of flash fiction - every page kicks you in the guts.
Read
December 11, 2020‘Dazzling writing, acutely attentive to simple truths.�
Jonathan Green
‘Beautiful…Finely wrought and tender stories.�
Fiona Wright
‘A Constant Hum is a remarkable work of fiction, producing a suite of stories dealing with the fundamental human concerns of love, grief and recovery. Alice Bishop has the capacity to convey such emotions with tenderness, a lightness of touch and true craft. She is a writer of the highest quality.�
Tony Birch
‘Some pieces are only a sentence or two, but even those snippets pack an emotional punch, and I found the varying story lengths built a sense of collective grief—and hope. A Constant Hum brims with Aussie cultural references, making it hard to imagine the events in any other setting. But it also pokes at bigger questions—how do people change after a life-changing event? how does one rediscover normality?—that many of us are asking these days.�
New York Times
‘In this resonant collection, Bishop gives both scope and startling immediacy to one of Victoria’s darkest days. These are indelible lives, and A Constant Hum is an essential, intimate charting of the farthest reaches of devastation and hope.�
Josephine Rowe
‘We witness the full impact of the fires…and while the characters change, we’re always mindful of their context. A Constant Hum’s other strength is at the sentence level, and Bishop’s descriptions have both an otherworldly and strong, realistic typicalness to them...It’s easy to take a cynical view of the connected short-story collection [but] Bishop’s collection takes a much more successful route, a collection linked together in tone.�
Readings
‘Amazing, beautiful, important.�
Final Draft, 2SER
‘Alice Bishop’s debut collection of stories packs an emotional punch…We step into the lives of those who survived, physically at least, the tragic and calamitous fires…It is refreshing and pleasing that Bishop spends more of her time exploring the impact of the bushfires through the emotionality of her characters and getting at their inner drives and motives.�
Saturday Paper
‘Shows us Australia in all its brutal intensity…The stories portray people in both their complexity and their ordinariness—because they could easily be any of us.�
Herald Sun
‘Extremely well measured…A heartbreakingly beautiful book that is both uncomfortable and essential reading.�
Kill Your Darlings
'Every word counts... While some of the stories in this collection describe astonishing and exhilarating acts of survival, most concern resilience and less dramatic moments that are not usually discussed. How do people survive after a life changing event? How do they find a new normality?'
Sydney Review of Books
Jonathan Green
‘Beautiful…Finely wrought and tender stories.�
Fiona Wright
‘A Constant Hum is a remarkable work of fiction, producing a suite of stories dealing with the fundamental human concerns of love, grief and recovery. Alice Bishop has the capacity to convey such emotions with tenderness, a lightness of touch and true craft. She is a writer of the highest quality.�
Tony Birch
‘Some pieces are only a sentence or two, but even those snippets pack an emotional punch, and I found the varying story lengths built a sense of collective grief—and hope. A Constant Hum brims with Aussie cultural references, making it hard to imagine the events in any other setting. But it also pokes at bigger questions—how do people change after a life-changing event? how does one rediscover normality?—that many of us are asking these days.�
New York Times
‘In this resonant collection, Bishop gives both scope and startling immediacy to one of Victoria’s darkest days. These are indelible lives, and A Constant Hum is an essential, intimate charting of the farthest reaches of devastation and hope.�
Josephine Rowe
‘We witness the full impact of the fires…and while the characters change, we’re always mindful of their context. A Constant Hum’s other strength is at the sentence level, and Bishop’s descriptions have both an otherworldly and strong, realistic typicalness to them...It’s easy to take a cynical view of the connected short-story collection [but] Bishop’s collection takes a much more successful route, a collection linked together in tone.�
Readings
‘Amazing, beautiful, important.�
Final Draft, 2SER
‘Alice Bishop’s debut collection of stories packs an emotional punch…We step into the lives of those who survived, physically at least, the tragic and calamitous fires…It is refreshing and pleasing that Bishop spends more of her time exploring the impact of the bushfires through the emotionality of her characters and getting at their inner drives and motives.�
Saturday Paper
‘Shows us Australia in all its brutal intensity…The stories portray people in both their complexity and their ordinariness—because they could easily be any of us.�
Herald Sun
‘Extremely well measured…A heartbreakingly beautiful book that is both uncomfortable and essential reading.�
Kill Your Darlings
'Every word counts... While some of the stories in this collection describe astonishing and exhilarating acts of survival, most concern resilience and less dramatic moments that are not usually discussed. How do people survive after a life changing event? How do they find a new normality?'
Sydney Review of Books
August 2, 2019
Well, that was a feast made from grief and completely, hauntingly, divine. ‘A Constant Hum� by Alice Bishop is a Short Story Collection based on the aftermath of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires.
It features a variation of viewpoints and Short Story forms - everything from minisagas to microfiction, and microstory (of only a few words) interspersed with flash fiction and longer form short stories too.
The pace of them - longer and short form one after the other - makes it read like the waves and stages of grief. And sometimes we get the barest hint of an aspect of the tragedy, like it’s all we can handle of the whole. One line a character utters in a story hints at these fleeting moments: ‘It’s okay, Haze, sometimes things just disappear.�
It’s stunning, and unsurprising that Bishop herself grew up in Christmas Hills - one town devastated by the fires. This collection feels both assured and vulnerable, a hard and hurting reading but necessary and so very, very fulfilling. I loved it.
It’s also worth reading her acknowledgments at the back - and the very end, where Bishop lists all the places where many of the stories were previously published or recognised: journals and magazines, websites, and short story prizes ... it highlights how long Bishop has been writing and finessing this collection, and it’s proof-positive that building a writing resume (particularly of your short-story work) is well worth doing. It takes time, but the best things often do.
It features a variation of viewpoints and Short Story forms - everything from minisagas to microfiction, and microstory (of only a few words) interspersed with flash fiction and longer form short stories too.
The pace of them - longer and short form one after the other - makes it read like the waves and stages of grief. And sometimes we get the barest hint of an aspect of the tragedy, like it’s all we can handle of the whole. One line a character utters in a story hints at these fleeting moments: ‘It’s okay, Haze, sometimes things just disappear.�
It’s stunning, and unsurprising that Bishop herself grew up in Christmas Hills - one town devastated by the fires. This collection feels both assured and vulnerable, a hard and hurting reading but necessary and so very, very fulfilling. I loved it.
It’s also worth reading her acknowledgments at the back - and the very end, where Bishop lists all the places where many of the stories were previously published or recognised: journals and magazines, websites, and short story prizes ... it highlights how long Bishop has been writing and finessing this collection, and it’s proof-positive that building a writing resume (particularly of your short-story work) is well worth doing. It takes time, but the best things often do.
January 6, 2021
3.5 stars
September 5, 2019
Each fragment seems like the playing of a single frequency of the story, one of these hums, and they add to each other and accumulate and by the book's end you're left with this slightly mysterious but completely real sense of experience. So evocative and completely beautiful. A moving and special piece of work.
August 15, 2019
This is subject matter that I've experienced first hand and this collection was unable to capture the experience. It would take an exceptional writer to do it and I think the author was ill-advised to gather these stories into a collection.
As single pieces of writing these short stories may work, however as a fictional collection it comes across as trite, unauthentic and immature.
A firestorm obliterates. It's not something that should be used as a literary device by someone of little experience.
As single pieces of writing these short stories may work, however as a fictional collection it comes across as trite, unauthentic and immature.
A firestorm obliterates. It's not something that should be used as a literary device by someone of little experience.
March 2, 2020
Really excellent collection of short stories. Incredible writing, highly recommend.
September 23, 2019
Wow - what an emotional and powerful book. This collection of short stories and microfiction explore the aftermath of the Black Saturday bushfires. The stories accrue layer upon layer to create a strong mood of grief and desolation - but also hope, the sense of regrowing. The stories are little glimpses into people's lives from a range of perspectives. I cried so much at the end! Definitely one to be read as entire collection, rather than as 'stand alone' stories'. Individually the stories were good but their power comes as a collective. Alice lost her own home in the fires, and I felt really privileged to be able to read her retelling of the way the fires affected these communities.
November 2, 2019
by Alice Bishop is a quiet, contemplative collection of stories about a brutal topic - the 2009 Victorian Black Saturday bushfires.
There are dozens of stories in this collection, some just a sentence or paragraph long. The stories focus on the aftermath of the fires, and are told from various perspectives - those who lost family and homes; a nurse working in a burns unit; kids resettling in city schools while houses are rebuilt; someone thinking about the Google Earth satellite and lag before new pictures of blackened earth will replace those of her house, standing as it once was.
A handful of stories shone. In Soft News, a class is asked to imagine what they would save from a burning house. While the girls list their adidas leggings, Maybelline lipsticks and phones, the narrator names just two things - her mother and her aunt. In Just a Spark, a woman sits through the trial of the man who started the fatal blaze that took the lives of her daughter, grandson and son-in-law. At the end of each day, she parks her car at McDonald’s, where she '...imagines what it’d be like to feel normal again, just for a moment.'
The stand-out, Clearing, described a couple's return to their devastated community, only to find that others are not coming back. The descriptions of their attempts to 'get back to normal' after such tragedy were a blend of sadness, fortitude and despair, with Theo asking, "'How can I stop remembering the little things...?"
There's a delicacy to Bishop's writing - it would have been easy to focus on the horrific details of the fires and their catastrophic physical damage, but instead she writes about the social and emotional aftermath - it too is shocking, but in a quieter, cumulative way. Notably, she captures the particular struggle of many who have experienced a trauma - while they don't want to think about it all of the time, they do think about it all of the time. But of course, trauma is a complex beast, with 'survivor guilt', grief, and the ways people cope giving it muscle and longevity. By exploring all of these elements through many characters, Bishop has created a rich and cohesive collection.
3.5/5 Finely written.
You remember mostly, three a.m.: they found our neighbours in clusters, mostly in amalgam fillings and tyre rims trickled into what looked like snowy earth - silvers, gunmetal greys and blacks so petrol-shiny you'd think of a currawong's wing... We were comforted, afterwards, that things ended for them together, holding each other under betadine-and-copper-coloured smoke. Under a sky that'd once promised kinder things: maybe Vegemite toast on Sunday morning, maybe a weeknight, after-work kiss.
There are dozens of stories in this collection, some just a sentence or paragraph long. The stories focus on the aftermath of the fires, and are told from various perspectives - those who lost family and homes; a nurse working in a burns unit; kids resettling in city schools while houses are rebuilt; someone thinking about the Google Earth satellite and lag before new pictures of blackened earth will replace those of her house, standing as it once was.
A handful of stories shone. In Soft News, a class is asked to imagine what they would save from a burning house. While the girls list their adidas leggings, Maybelline lipsticks and phones, the narrator names just two things - her mother and her aunt. In Just a Spark, a woman sits through the trial of the man who started the fatal blaze that took the lives of her daughter, grandson and son-in-law. At the end of each day, she parks her car at McDonald’s, where she '...imagines what it’d be like to feel normal again, just for a moment.'
The stand-out, Clearing, described a couple's return to their devastated community, only to find that others are not coming back. The descriptions of their attempts to 'get back to normal' after such tragedy were a blend of sadness, fortitude and despair, with Theo asking, "'How can I stop remembering the little things...?"
...she knew it was Theo's way of dealing with the accumulating unrest - which hit him hardest in the hours just before dawn. Peanut-butter toast and black tea fixed it for a while, the late-night snack occupying time, making him forget, for a few moments, the longing for their cupboards of photos, his inherited leather motorbike jacket - once worn by his father in all kinds of weather - and the knotted-pine doors.
There's a delicacy to Bishop's writing - it would have been easy to focus on the horrific details of the fires and their catastrophic physical damage, but instead she writes about the social and emotional aftermath - it too is shocking, but in a quieter, cumulative way. Notably, she captures the particular struggle of many who have experienced a trauma - while they don't want to think about it all of the time, they do think about it all of the time. But of course, trauma is a complex beast, with 'survivor guilt', grief, and the ways people cope giving it muscle and longevity. By exploring all of these elements through many characters, Bishop has created a rich and cohesive collection.
It's been years, now, but Kay's chest still whirrs along to some white-noise hum since she watched the wool-furred dog curl up from smoke inhalation - her own breath quickening as the walls lit up around her: scrambling for the car keys in the sudden, umber-edged dark.
3.5/5 Finely written.
July 30, 2020
This should be compulsory reading in Australia.
October 21, 2019
A Constant Hum is undoubtedly one of my books of the year. Written with emotional intelligence, honesty and stunningly crafted words, this collection of short stories and flash fiction is a masterpiece, marking Bishop as one of the most sophisticated voices in new Australian fiction. Readers should note triggers for bushfire-related traumas, including severe burns injuries and references to deaths (human and animal) by fire or smoke inhalation.
Ten years on from the horrific Black Saturday bushfires, A Constant Hum is a timely and eloquent reminder that trauma does not end when media coverage does. Bishop has written voices that toll with the clarity of bells - we may not know their devastation first-hand, but we know those voices. They're our neighbour, our mother, our fifteen year old self. Therein lies the power of her writing - she is showing us that this suffering is not divided from us, it is woven into the fabric of who we have become since that day.
The snapshots she captures are not about resolution - they're about peeling back the layers of normality painted over grief, to expose what's underneath. We see the experience from so many angles - through the lenses of the lost and the saved and the first responders - to build a cumulative picture of the impact. Bishop is reminding us that there are so many stories within the tragedy of the fire, and they ought never fade.
She wastes no words, and each piece, whether 8 pages or 8 sentences, feels perfectly weighted. She knows the value of restraint, and the emotional effect of this is powerful. A must-read.
Ten years on from the horrific Black Saturday bushfires, A Constant Hum is a timely and eloquent reminder that trauma does not end when media coverage does. Bishop has written voices that toll with the clarity of bells - we may not know their devastation first-hand, but we know those voices. They're our neighbour, our mother, our fifteen year old self. Therein lies the power of her writing - she is showing us that this suffering is not divided from us, it is woven into the fabric of who we have become since that day.
The snapshots she captures are not about resolution - they're about peeling back the layers of normality painted over grief, to expose what's underneath. We see the experience from so many angles - through the lenses of the lost and the saved and the first responders - to build a cumulative picture of the impact. Bishop is reminding us that there are so many stories within the tragedy of the fire, and they ought never fade.
She wastes no words, and each piece, whether 8 pages or 8 sentences, feels perfectly weighted. She knows the value of restraint, and the emotional effect of this is powerful. A must-read.
Read
September 28, 2020A haunting collection of short fiction set shortly after the Black Saturday bushfires. The stories are told with care, the terror, chaos and loss never made to feel like a spectacle. Instead, resilience and strength is meshed with the lingering aftershocks of surviving such a hellish event, and I loved the intricate and unique perspectives each story shared.
February 8, 2020
The writing in this collection of stories was almost ethereal in its exquisiteness, and I fell fast into the flow. But in time the short format became wearing, with brevity blunting the full range of feeling.
January 7, 2020
It was both the best and the worst time to be reading this collection of short stories based on the Black Saturday bushfire tragedy as the smell of smoke permeated Melbourne from the current bushfire tragedy. It's about as topical as it could be, but there is plenty of craft here as well. Essential reading.
February 5, 2020
This book was harrowing. Challenging. Evocative of the time and place. Bishop captures the voices of the community so well. I had to stop often due to the challenging nature of the content, but I really recommend this book - especially in light of the current bushfire crisis.
January 3, 2020
Bloody hell. Went into this with no idea what it was about. An important time to read something like this 😔
April 18, 2021
A book of vignettes exploring the aftermath of the Black Saturday bushfires from different perspectives of those affected. A disclaimer: it’s impossible for me to be remotely objective about this book (not that I really try all that hard to be objective here anyway), it’s all too close to home, literally and metaphorically.
Some of the vignettes are harrowing, others verge on hopeful. Some get across the mood and feeling of that time more successfully than others. There were some moments of gorgeous prose, a few characters that will stay with me and I particularly enjoyed the shortest chapters, but there were limitations due to the format in terms of depth which is important with this topic. I also became frustrated with the constant use of branded food and objects as cultural markers.
Bishop is brave to take on such a project, which impacted (and continues to impact) so many people in so many different ways. While I acknowledge the limitations of this, I did feel there was a lack of diversity in the stories told. Bishop mainly focusses on lower middle class and middle aged white people, from immediately after the fires to a few years after. I wonder about young children growing up never knowing their parents, of those who have been permanently displaced, of those who have gone overseas to escape, of those who came out with stronger relationships, of how people will feel thirty years on, of the next generation who did not directly experience this tragedy but will be shaped by it nonetheless.
It was really disappointing that the voices and experiences of the traditional owners of the unceded land the fires took place on were not included. When it comes to climate change and especially bushfires and caring for this land, we need to be listening to those who have tended it for much longer than we have been here.
Some of the vignettes are harrowing, others verge on hopeful. Some get across the mood and feeling of that time more successfully than others. There were some moments of gorgeous prose, a few characters that will stay with me and I particularly enjoyed the shortest chapters, but there were limitations due to the format in terms of depth which is important with this topic. I also became frustrated with the constant use of branded food and objects as cultural markers.
Bishop is brave to take on such a project, which impacted (and continues to impact) so many people in so many different ways. While I acknowledge the limitations of this, I did feel there was a lack of diversity in the stories told. Bishop mainly focusses on lower middle class and middle aged white people, from immediately after the fires to a few years after. I wonder about young children growing up never knowing their parents, of those who have been permanently displaced, of those who have gone overseas to escape, of those who came out with stronger relationships, of how people will feel thirty years on, of the next generation who did not directly experience this tragedy but will be shaped by it nonetheless.
It was really disappointing that the voices and experiences of the traditional owners of the unceded land the fires took place on were not included. When it comes to climate change and especially bushfires and caring for this land, we need to be listening to those who have tended it for much longer than we have been here.
March 4, 2020
Breathtakingly soul wrenching writing about a horrific time in Australian history. Bishop’s ability to voice such distinctly individual characters, and stories is truly profound. Why this didn’t get nominated for the Stella Longlist I will forever wonder.
Read
March 24, 2020A Constant Hum by Alice Bishop
This collection of short stories is about people’s harrowing experience of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, and the painful process of recovery. The writer personally experienced these fires having lived, at the time, in Christmas Hills, near Yarra Gen.
Alice Bishop says she was just 22 when she first had the urge to write, but it took a decade from draft to print to have her collection eventually published in 2018. She is philosophical about her journey. ‘It’s okay for things to take the time they need to take.�
The stories are presented in three clusters: Prevailing, Southerly, Northerly. I guess this refers to the erratic nature of the wind in bushfires - either wilfully fanning the fire front to do its darndest or arriving just when all seemed lost, and driving the dreaded firestorm in another direction, away from panicked people, their properties and livelihood.
I found myself absorbed and deeply moved by Alice’s stories. So many anguished and varied voices. Just a Feral was only one of the many memorable stories. Here Sadie recollects, in sorrowful loving images, her partner, Dave, who dies alone when trapped in their burning house. She remembers his wide speckless smile and steel-wool curls, ends rusty from sun. Her grieving, and attempts to process Dave’s death unfold in vivid, meditative details: What he became was just a handful of ash and three silver-dotted molars. Dave’s livelihood was trapping and clearing ferals from the bush � sambar deer, rabbits, young foxes and Indian myna birds.
As a writer myself, I found Alice’s creative writing skills glow in this collection. Her empathy and understanding are evident in the clarity and simplicity with which she captures a range of survivor emotions - fear, pain, loss, guilt, gratitude and stoicism. Clearly, Alice had taken much time to listen closely to survivors speak of their trauma and loss, their struggle to get back on their feet and not lean on charity. Of course, Alice’s language of bushfires is also drawn from her personal confrontation with Black Saturday.
A Constant Hum was the third book I’ve read recently on the Black Saturday Bushfires � the others being Frank Prem’s Devil in the Wind and the children’s picture story book The House on the Mountain by Ella Holcombe & David Cox.
No doubt the most recent Australia-wide destructive bushfires of 2020, will spawn more publications in this genre.
This collection of short stories is about people’s harrowing experience of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, and the painful process of recovery. The writer personally experienced these fires having lived, at the time, in Christmas Hills, near Yarra Gen.
Alice Bishop says she was just 22 when she first had the urge to write, but it took a decade from draft to print to have her collection eventually published in 2018. She is philosophical about her journey. ‘It’s okay for things to take the time they need to take.�
The stories are presented in three clusters: Prevailing, Southerly, Northerly. I guess this refers to the erratic nature of the wind in bushfires - either wilfully fanning the fire front to do its darndest or arriving just when all seemed lost, and driving the dreaded firestorm in another direction, away from panicked people, their properties and livelihood.
I found myself absorbed and deeply moved by Alice’s stories. So many anguished and varied voices. Just a Feral was only one of the many memorable stories. Here Sadie recollects, in sorrowful loving images, her partner, Dave, who dies alone when trapped in their burning house. She remembers his wide speckless smile and steel-wool curls, ends rusty from sun. Her grieving, and attempts to process Dave’s death unfold in vivid, meditative details: What he became was just a handful of ash and three silver-dotted molars. Dave’s livelihood was trapping and clearing ferals from the bush � sambar deer, rabbits, young foxes and Indian myna birds.
As a writer myself, I found Alice’s creative writing skills glow in this collection. Her empathy and understanding are evident in the clarity and simplicity with which she captures a range of survivor emotions - fear, pain, loss, guilt, gratitude and stoicism. Clearly, Alice had taken much time to listen closely to survivors speak of their trauma and loss, their struggle to get back on their feet and not lean on charity. Of course, Alice’s language of bushfires is also drawn from her personal confrontation with Black Saturday.
A Constant Hum was the third book I’ve read recently on the Black Saturday Bushfires � the others being Frank Prem’s Devil in the Wind and the children’s picture story book The House on the Mountain by Ella Holcombe & David Cox.
No doubt the most recent Australia-wide destructive bushfires of 2020, will spawn more publications in this genre.
January 14, 2020
This raw, beautifully rendered collection of short stories and flash fiction themed around the Black Saturday bushfires in 2009 would be an emotive read at any time but is even more heart wrenching right now, in the middle of Australia’s most horrendous bushfire season in history.
I’m floored by Bishop’s talent in characterisation, even in snippets we get such a vivid sense of who these people are and the loss that they’ve experienced. This is an exceptional debut, I’m looking forward to reading more of Bishop’s work.
I’m floored by Bishop’s talent in characterisation, even in snippets we get such a vivid sense of who these people are and the loss that they’ve experienced. This is an exceptional debut, I’m looking forward to reading more of Bishop’s work.
August 1, 2020
This book was stunning, heartbreaking and gave me goosebumps more than once. It was a deep dive into the multifarious effects of trauma induced by bushfires based on the 2009 Black Friday fires.
Just as bushfires will continue to burn, this book is likely to be one that I come back to often. I hope to teach the text in my English class, using it as a tool to inspire my students to write with feeling, sincerity and stark humility.
Just as bushfires will continue to burn, this book is likely to be one that I come back to often. I hope to teach the text in my English class, using it as a tool to inspire my students to write with feeling, sincerity and stark humility.
May 12, 2021
A collection of short stories about the aftermath of the Black Saturday bush fires. Just so incredibly moving. I had goosebumps.
October 7, 2019
This is probably one of the best books I've read this year.
The collection deals with the Black Saturday bushfires in 2009, which had an incredible loss of life and destruction of property.
Story after story builds up into a sense of loss and despair and trying to cope with ydealing with the consequences of the fires.
How soon we forget when media attention isn't looking at a disaster.
Highly recommended.
The collection deals with the Black Saturday bushfires in 2009, which had an incredible loss of life and destruction of property.
Story after story builds up into a sense of loss and despair and trying to cope with ydealing with the consequences of the fires.
How soon we forget when media attention isn't looking at a disaster.
Highly recommended.
February 2, 2020
Poetic, harrowing and haunting.
January 25, 2020
A beautiful and touching collection of stories from the people who were impacted by the Victorian Bushfires. Thank you for sharing.
December 29, 2019
Haunting, beautiful and heart breaking.
February 4, 2020
A brilliant, unique exploration of the Black Saturday fires. Beautiful writing and a really different style of collection. Enjoyed immensely
January 8, 2020
"Alice Bishop is an incredible force of modern Australian storytelling, and I highly recommend this work; it would be the ideal holiday read. Perhaps on a beach in Hawaii, while you avoid all responsibilities."
I couldn't resist calling out our woeful leadership in our time of need, especially given the current state of Australia's environment.
Full review on the Underground Writer's website:
I couldn't resist calling out our woeful leadership in our time of need, especially given the current state of Australia's environment.
Full review on the Underground Writer's website:
February 3, 2020
Painful but so well-written.
February 24, 2021
I was expecting to at least be moved by some of the stories but I felt nothing, to the point of feeling quite bored by it all. I don’t know if it’s because the stories are so short that they don’t give me enough time to get into the groove of it. I really wanted to like the book but I just found myself not caring for any of the characters or their stories. I didn't know where they were, their motives, whether someone they lost had died in the fires... Is it because they are written in the second person? I don’t know, there wasn't enough to keep me hooked.
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