Murmurations

For the first time since he’d left the island he thought of the starlings massed at dusk in the winter trees behind the children’s home. He remembered the rustle of their wings when they twisted in skeins over the fields, or swelled and contracted high above the cliffs, dark wave after dark wave, lifting and falling in a kind of dance. Sister Lucy had said it was a murmuration. He was still quite young, and he had thought the birds were showing him a sign, that there was something written in their fluid patterns.

Lives merge and diverge; they soar and plunge, or come to rest in impenetrable silence. Erris Cleary’s absence haunts the pages of this exquisite novella, a woman who complicates other lives yet confers unexpected blessings. Fly far, be free, urges Erris. Who can know why she smashes mirrors? Who can say why she does not heed her own advice?

Among the sudden shifts and swings something hidden must be uncovered, something dark and rotten, even evil, which has masqueraded as normality. In the end it will be a writer’s task to reclaim Erris, to bear witness, to sound in fiction the one true note that will crack the silence.

About the Author

Carol Lefevre holds both a M.A. and a Ph.D in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide, where she is a Visiting Research Fellow. She has written three novels If You Were Mine (2008) and Nights in the Asylum (2007), which won the Kibble Award, the People’s Choice Award at the South Australian Writers Festival and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Her novel, The Happiness Glass, was published by Spinifex Press in 2018. Her non-fiction book Quiet City: Walking in West Terrace Cemetery (2016) was shortlisted for the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature.

In 2016, Carol won the Barbara Hanrahan Fellowship at the South Australian Festival Awards for Literature. She was Writer-in-Residence at the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice in 2016/17.