Happy Families
Hodder Headline, 1999
Winner of the Vision Australia Braille Book of the Year, and Talking Book of the Year, 2000
‘I’m falling apart, Jane thinks. Or maybe I’m not, maybe it’s just ‘it’ falling apart. The marriage. The edifice. The cornerstone. The gateway of respectability. The millstone. The bloody weight around my neck. The chain dragging at my ankles.’
Happy families are not always conventional. Conventional families are not always happy.
In her first book since the acclaimed Heddy and Me, Susan Varga paints a panorama in minature of contemporary Australian life. Different worlds connect and collide: city and country, ‘old’ Europe and ‘new’ Australia, black and white Australians, male and female values.
A warm and compelling novel about women’s lives, about the past and its secrets and the different shapes families can take.
Reviews
‘Varga is a very deft weaver . . . She’s a writer who has clearly spent a long time paying attention to the clamour of love and hate within families: the murmur of old allegiances, the sizzle of unresolved rivalries . . . in this delicate unravelling of the family romance.’
Michelle de Kretser, The Australian
“When James left, she now realises, the condition of hope deserted her. Without hope, curiosity dies too. And without curiosity, there is no love, because when you really love, you are curious about the beloved.”
‘This is typical of the simple, insightful prose with which Varga communicates her characters’ predicaments. No fireworks, no remaking the language, just a moving plainness.’
Marion Halligan, The Canberra Times
‘What impresses me the most about Happy Families is its mixing up of ephemeral and everyday gestures with the baggage of unspeakable pain: an observing eye that carries the narrative around and in a forward motion, and allows a seeping of compassion through its authorial voice . . .
Susan Varga is a careful novelist: always tender with her representations of such loss.’
Terri-Ann White, Australian Book Review
Happy Families is available in most good book shops
©Susan Varga 2023
contact: info@susanvargawriter.com