In this beautifully written and disturbing Australian coming-of-age
novel, McMaster tells the story of Sooky, who struggles to overcome her
difficult childhood, the effects of which are powerfully portrayed as
she moves from relationship to relationship and from Brisbane to
London.--Boston Globe
"I think it's quite wonderful. Beautifully written. Engrossing and
utterly involving and it does something new."--Maureen Freely
Let me say that Rhyll McMaster is an extraordinary writer. Her prose is
dazzling, poetic and thought-provoking, and this is literary fiction at
its best... I have likened Rhyll McMaster to Margaret Atwood. Atwood is
brilliant, but in my view McMaster is even better. Feather Man has
quite rightly won literary prizes in Australia and my money is on
Feather Man making the Booker Prize longlist here. --Vulpes Libris
Winner of the Barbara Jefferis Award 2008
Winner of the Glenda Adams Award for New Writing 2008
Set in Brisbane during the stultifying 1950s and moving to grubby London
in the 1970s, Feather Man is about Sooky who, ignored and
misunderstood by her parents, is encouraged to make herself scarce and
visit Lionel, their elderly next door neighbor.
The early pages of Feather Man are full of images of suburban life in
Brisbane in the 1950s. The Thor washing machine thunders away. A
kookaburra is perched on the oven door. Sooky's mother is often chained
to the treadmill of her sewing machine. The novel follows Sooky through
four relationships with men and her entry into the art world, but the
truth is, she is never able to survive unless a relationship is
providing the context, however bad it may be.
My hands still gripped his shoulders. I felt the bat wings of hair that
ran across his back. He pushed his face close to mine. I looked at his
eyes. They were remarkable, glassy, with yellow rays, but now they had a
white glare in them, as if I was looking up close into the tunnel of a
turned-on torch.
'Whose girl are you?' He gave my shoulders a shake.
'I'm nobody's girl. I'm me.'
Rhyll McMaster, born in 1947, started writing poetry whilst a child.
Washing the Money won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award and the
Grace Leven Prize. Feather Man is her first novel.
