It had never been cleared away, what sadness people left behind. The city, with its dark colonial legacy, becomes a metaphor for the burden of inheritance: Where in the first the dramatic coastal landscape inspires dread and awe, in her follow-up Parrett turns to Hobart’s architecture to underscore the siblings’ vulnerability: heading home through the cobbled lanes, Isla imagines the old stones are blood-soaked, that ghosts are clawing at their clothes. As the family makes a new start in Hobart, and twelve year-old Isla quietly assumes responsibility for her younger brother − fixing him meals, getting him home from school safely − it becomes apparent that the children’s mother is a remote, emotionally absent figure.Ĭoncerned with troubled familial legacies, both novels have an air of the Gothic.

Parrett’s second novel, When the Night Comes (2014), opens in familiar territory: a mother fleeing a tumultuous marriage on a ferry in the night, two children in tow. Set in a small fishing town on Bruny Island off the coast of Tasmania, Parrett’s debut novel Past the Shallows (2011) is narrated from the perspective of two brothers subject to the whims of a violent, alcoholic father their mother died in a car accident in an attempt to escape with them to a better life. Across three novels, the Australian author’s concern has been the vulnerability of children, dependent upon the mercy of adults as they navigate an inscrutable, forbidding world. It’s a grim assessment, one that I returned to as I immersed myself in the world of Favel Parrett’s fiction. ‘Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can’t get out of it on your own,’ Tove Ditlevsen wrote in Childhood (1967), the first volume in her autobiographical trilogy, an account of a lonely, impoverished Copenhagen upbringing.

There was still love favel parrett