Mockingbirds and lyrebirds and what editors do

There’s been a great to-do about the extent to which the writer, now 89 and almost deaf and blind after a stroke, was involved in the recent publication process, particularly as the manuscript was found by one of Alice’s colleagues soon after Alice’s death.

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Why novelists are excellent at doing laundry

Why novelists are excellent at doing laundry

 I love everything about the laundry, from the piles of dirty clothes that ask only to be sorted into whites, colours and those things that are neither whites nor colours, to their turn in the Germanic front loader that’s been working diligently in our various houses for over 12 years – so powerful it shakes our current Queenslander on its stumps, as if we’re spinning towards Armageddon rather than the end of the cotton cycle –  to the hanging.

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