Pursuing Love and Death

Heather Taylor Johnson

sht 2013 · Shitur nga HarperCollins Australia

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Told with the perfect mix of humour and tragedy, this is a tale for all families who have ever questioned how well a relative can really ever know another.
It is customary to bring gifts to a wedding. But as daughter Luna prepares to marry her dream husband, the Smith family instead have in tow their own idiosyncratic brands of emotional baggage. Her father, Graham, struggles to write his own own obituary; her mother, Velma, attempts to negotiate her mid-life crisis with a lover seventeen years her junior; her brother, Ginsberg, tries to come to term with being a homosexual who has inadvertently fallen in love with his wife; and her obese uncle, Darren, starts an obsession with the absurd hero Ignatius J Reilly of John Kennedy toole's A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES. Can these hopelessly misguided attempts to unravel the complexities of family, legacy, sexuality and, ultimately, love and death, ever come to a resolution? A stunning debut novel by Heather taylor Johnson, PURSUING LOVE AND DEAtH is a darkly comic family saga, written with wit, lyricism and poignancy. It asks just how well we can really know our own family members, and what might be 'good enough' for them, as well as for ourselves. With clashing personalities uniting for the first time in years, the result is explosive. 'A novel where comedy and small tragedies are dealt a generous hand ... this is a work brimming with poetic carnality' Brian Castro 'An impressively confident debut .. Funny, poignant and messy' Caroline Baum

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Heather Taylor Johnson is the author of three poetry books: Thirsting for Lemonade (IP, 2013), Letters to my Lover from a Small Mountain Town (IP, 2012) and Exit Wounds (Picaro Press, 2007). She is the poetry editor for Transnational Literature and was the innaugural poetry editor for Wet Ink magazine (2005-2012). She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide and currently teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at Flinders University. Pursuing Love and Death is Heather's first novel.