ACT Book of the Year
Shortlisted 2009
John Clancy Her Father's Daughter |  |
SYNOPSIS
As the title suggests, this collection of five (long) short stories is thematically organised around father-daughter relationships. In these stories we meet fathers and daughters of all ages and with all kinds of relationships - a stepfather finds out his teenage daughter is working as a prostitute in St Kilda to support her secret drug habit; a woman colludes with her elderly father on ways to take his own life; a man gets a call from his long-lost daughter which opens up old wounds on the subject of her paternity; a seventeen-year-old girl travels to Greece to stay with the father she has not seen for ten years; and a woman whose marriage has ended must find a way to tell her old-fashioned father that she has fallen in love with a woman. Clanchy's characters grapple with questions of life and death, love and loss, through the prism of the father-daughter relationship. Some stories are told from the father's perspective; some from the daughters.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOHN CLANCHY was born in Melbourne in 1943, but has lived in Canberra (working as a counsellor and academic at the Australian National University) since 1975. He was for some years head of an academic advisory centre for students at the Australian National University and foundation director of the Graduate Teaching Program in the university's Graduate School.
John has published nine volumes of fiction (five novels and three collections), as well as many uncollected short stories in magazines, newspapers and anthologies. His stories have won many awards, in Australia, Europe, the US and New Zealand. His novel The Hard Word won the 2003 ACT book of the Year in 2003, and his collection of stories Vincenzo's Garden won both the same prize in 2006 and the Steele Rudd Award the year before.
In addition to literary fiction, John has co-authored two detective thrillers with Mark Henshaw If God Sleeps and And Hope to Die, both now appearing in French and German.
His most recent collection Her Father's Daughter, five long stories dealing with the complex and often fraught relations between fathers and daughters, was released in August 2008.
Find more books by this author in the ACT Public Libraries.
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