New novel · Marion’s Dilemma
Fiction about desire, power, and the lives women choose for themselves.
Sensual literary fiction · for adult readers
The novels
Marion has nursed for thirty-eight years and been married nearly as long. Coming off her sixth night shift, she finds out what her husband has never been able to ask her for — and decides, at fifty-nine, to stop waiting.
For adult readers. Deals frankly with desire inside a long marriage and with power between people who love each other.
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Jess Heart has defended men in Hobart’s criminal courts for fourteen years without once looking too hard at the women in the gallery. Then a legal aid brief arrives that she cannot put down, and she goes to find the complainant — only to look at her. Everything that happens afterwards is asked for first, and freely given.
For adult readers. Deals with family violence, coercive control and the slow loss of a self, and contains explicit sexual content.
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Robyn Cooper has run eleven thousand acres on the western slopes alone for eleven years. Then Leonie Vasey, a schoolteacher who fixes people, comes to stay for the summer — and the husband Robyn left in Sydney comes up the drive.
For adult readers. Contains frank sexual content, the end of a long marriage, and a brief memory of sexual assault.
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Two strangers meet at a baggage carousel in Milan, and one of them is remade. A newly widowed businessman, a woman leaving a small life behind, and a stay in Italy that rearranges who holds the power, and what it costs.
For adult readers. Deals with coercive control, psychological domination and bodily transformation.
Start reading → or download EPUB · PDFShe had her hand on a woman’s bare back in the middle of a hot afternoon. She could feel her own pulse in her thumb. Silk Purse
About the author
Sharyn Underhill came to fiction late, after twenty years of professional life and two children now grown and gone. She is in her fifties, which she mentions because the women in her books are rarely young and she is tired of pretending that reinvention belongs to people under thirty.
She lives in rural Tasmania. The bush there is not scenic; it is old, indifferent and hard on the unprepared, and she prefers it to gentler country. Weather does things to a landscape slowly and without asking, which is roughly what her novels are about.
The Transformation of Rowena Thornhill is her first — a story of domination and remaking, written to be taken seriously rather than enjoyed quickly, and set a long way from home, in Italy, where nobody knows anyone.
Silk Purse, her second, stays closer to home: a woman not remade but uncovered.
Relationship to Witness, her third, is about the stories we tell for other people, and the one we cannot tell about ourselves.
Letters
Sharyn reads every letter. With the writer’s permission, a selection is published on each book’s page.
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