Margins
The High Places book cover
The High Places
2016
First Published
3.37
Average Rating
288
Number of Pages
What a terrible thing at a time like to own a house, and the trees around it. Janet sat rigid in her seat. The plane lifted from the city and her house fell away, consumed by the other houses. Janet worried about her own particular garden and her emptied refrigerator and her lamps that had been timed to come on at six. So begins "Mycenae," a story in The High Places, Fiona McFarlane's first story collection. Her stories skip across continents, eras, and genres to chart the borderlands of emotional life. In "Mycenae," she describes a middle-aged couple's disastrous vacation with old friends. In "Good News for Modern Man," a scientist lives on a small island with only a colossal squid and the ghost of Charles Darwin for company. And in the title story, an Australian farmer turns to Old Testament methods to relieve a fatal drought. Each story explores what Flannery O'Connor called "mystery and manners." The collection dissects the feelings—longing, contempt, love, fear—that animate our existence and hints at a reality beyond the smallness of our lives. Salon 's Laura Miller called McFarlane's The Night Guest "a novel of uncanny emotional penetration . . . How could anyone so young portray so persuasively what it feels like to look back on a lot more life than you can see in front of you?" The High Places is further evidence of McFarlane's preternatural talent, a debut collection that reads like the selected works of a literary great.
Avg Rating
3.37
Number of Ratings
461
5 STARS
12%
4 STARS
33%
3 STARS
39%
2 STARS
11%
1 STARS
5%
goodreads

Author

Fiona McFarlane
Fiona McFarlane
Author · 5 books

Fiona McFarlane grew up in Sydney, Australia. She studied English at Sydney University and completed a PhD on nostalgia in American fiction at Cambridge University. She spent 3 years at writing residencies in the US - at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts and Philips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire - before studying for a Masters of Fine Arts in Fiction at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, Austin. Fiona's first novel, The Night Guest, will be published in 19 countries and 15 languages, and has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Stella Prize, an LA Times Book Review prize, an INDIE Award, the Dobbie Literary Award and an Australian Book Industry Award. The Night Guest won a NSW Premier's Prize and Fiona was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist for 2014. Fiona's short stories have been published in Zoetrope: All-Story, Southerly, Best Australian Stories, New Australian Stories 2, the Missouri Review and the New Yorker. She is currently completing a collection, to be published by Penguin Australia, Sceptre (UK) and Faber and Faber (US).

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