Nick: so persuasive, ever the optimist, still boyishly handsome. Always on a quest to spin straw into gold, to heal wounded souls.
The conversion was his idea, but it's Zoe who's here now, in a valley of old coalmines and new vineyards, working out how to live in a deconsecrated church.
What to do with the altar, all those memorial plaques and the stained-glass windows?
Alone, and troubled by a restless ghost, Zoe is stuck in purgatory—until a young teacher named Melanie barges into her life.
Amanda Lohrey's The Conversion is a startling and seductive novel about how the homes we live in shape us. Like the bestselling The Labyrinth, it is distinguished by its clear-eyed intelligence, instinct for drama, and effortless readability.
Amanda Lohrey lives in Tasmania and writes fiction and non-fiction. She has taught at the University of Tasmania, the University of Technology Sydney and the University of Queensland. Amanda is a regular contributor to the Monthly magazine and a former senior fellow of the Australia Council's Literature Board. She received the 2012 Patrick White Award. The Labyrinth (2021), her eighth work of fiction, won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, a Prime Minister's Literary Award, a Tasmanian Literary Award and the Voss Literary Prize.
'Buy this one. [Amanda Lohrey's] brilliant.' Australian
'Written in Lohrey's familiar economical prose and exhibiting a fascination with the space we inhabit, The Conversion is an absorbing fiction of dealing with people and events from the past, and finding a way into the future.' Age
'One of the things Lohrey does is to take quite portentious, serious things and put them in ordinary contexts and see if they work, see what they mean when you put them in that setting.' James Ley, ABC RN Bookshelf
'We see [Lohrey's] interest in place, in buildings, in physical spaces, but also in therapy and psychiatry...I really enjoy what Amanda Lohrey has done by keeping us guessing in this novel.' Kate Evans, ABC RN Bookshelf
'Astonishing and beguiling.' Canberra Times
'Amanda Lohrey's ninth novel, The Conversion, is filled with intrusions, insistence, and ghosts...In this blazing, layered, bravura novel, Lohrey probes the dreamed, remembered, and hoped-for in an anatomy of freedom and aftermath.' Felicity Plunkett, Australian Book Review
'This is what Lohrey does best: she seeks to appreciate the internal ponderings of many and then to package them into a compassionate story, using characters that are finely attuned to our own meandering thoughts...This novel is perfect for long-term fans and alos for readers of Ann Patchett and Alice Munro. Their ability to record every day ordinariness is what makes these writers extraordinary. Read The Conversion to be still, and to marvel.' Readings Monthly
