Wall

A woman returns to Australia to clear out her father’s house, with an eye to transforming the contents into an art installation in the tradition of the revered Chinese artist, Song Dong. What she hasn’t reckoned with is the tangle of jealousies, resentments, and familial complications that she had thought, in leaving the country, she had put behind her – a tangle that ensnares her before she even arrives. 'Wall is an extraordinarily compacted work of rich complexity, humour, and sadness. Its narrator's steadfast desire to explain herself, to clarify the seemingly unclarifiable, is as close to mirroring the roiling momentum of real consciousness that I've read in a modern novel. When I read Jen Craig I find it impossible to imagine a better way to capture the mysterious workings of the mind – its inadvertent epiphanies, its loose but determined associations, its cruelly recurring entrapments – without writing just like her. But no one else could.' – Shaun Prescott