ACT Book of the Year

Winner 2010

Marion Halligan Valley of Grace Allen and Unwin

CITATION

The judges of the ACT Book of the Year Award considered Valley of Grace to be a beautiful work both in form and in content.

It was considered that this book by Marion Halligan strongly met the criteria for the Award being that of excellence in literature, quality of writing and a contribution to the ACT’s literary profile. It was also considered that the work possessed a high quality physical aesthetic.

The book’s style was considered elegant and full of evocative detail and its structure delicately balanced. Interwoven narratives present a loving but unsentimental picture of the city of Paris and of the French way of life in all its charm, elegance, and sensuality. Yet beneath these delights runs a dark undercurrent of loss and death, of betrayal, of cruelty, and of the hold that the past continues to have on the present.

Marion Halligan has a lengthy list of awards and literary prizes to her name and is a novelist, essayist and short-story writer. She has been short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and has been awarded the Age Book of the Year, the Steele Rudd Award, and the Nita B. Kibble Award. In 2006 she was made a Member of the Order of Australia for her services to Literature. She lives in Canberra.

SYNOPSIS

Valley of Grace is an interwoven narrative of modern day Paris.

Fanny and Gerard fall in love in a way that surprises even them as their lives fill with good sex and loving companionship. But they long for a child to complete their happiness. Two of Fanny's lesbian friends feel similarly driven by the need to have a child. But how to make that possible?

Jean-Marie is an internationally regarded professor of philosophy whose adoring students are willing sexual partners fulfilling the tenets of his libertarianism. But perhaps philosophy can't bear the weight of human emotion.

When Gerard buys a beautiful old house in the suburbs, the disturbing contents of the attic binds the stories into an intriguing and darkly disturbing knot.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marion Halligan is an award-winning novelist, essayist and short-story writer with many prizes to her name, including The Age Book of the Year, the ACT Book of the Year, the Nita B. Kibble Award, the Steele Rudd Award, the Braille Book of the Year, the 3M Talking Book of the Year and the Geraldine Pascall prize for critical writing. She has also been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Dublin IMPAC Prize and the Miles Franklin Award. Her previous works include The Point, The Fog Garden, A Taste of Memory, The Apricot Colonel, Murder on the Apricot Coast, and Valley of Grace.

Find more books by this author in the ACT Public Libraries. 

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