How to Love the World

Perhaps motherhood is always a promise that cannot be kept.

When her children are born, Nellika vows she will be the perfect mother. Motherhood is sacred, mythic: it will remake everything that is broken in her. But as her children grow, something buried is awakened, and the myth begins to crack.

Only the cool, green silence of the forest, where Nellika walks every day, can soothe what is repeatedly torn apart by family life. One morning, deep in a remote part of the forest, she is struck by a falling manna gum branch. Shockingly injured and unable to move, her only hope is that someone will find her.

As darkness falls on what might be her last day, Nellika must reckon with herself and the place where she lies. Is this fallen branch an accident or a punishment? As death draws close, the forest asks her: why should you live? And in the dark heart of her memories, she discovers that there is an answer.

A powerful meditation on nature and healing, How to Love the World finds hope where none seems possible.

About the Author

Ilka Tampke is an award-winning author, academic and teacher. Her first two novels explore the druidic culture of Ancient Britain and its disruption by Roman colonisation. Skin (2015) was published in eight countries and nominated for the Voss Literary Prize and the Aurealis Awards. Songwoman (2018) was published in five countries and won the Small Press Network Book of the Year Award in 2019.

Ilka was the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre Writer in Residence in 2019 and has lectured and presented at many festivals and organisations around Australia. She teaches creative writing at RMIT University and is currently completing a PhD in Australian forest poetics at La Trobe University.