Author Archives: Rosa Kiely

Ten years ago, Elizabeth Gilbert published her little memoir about the year she spent picking her life together after divorce and depression by travelling to Italy, India and then Indonesia to find what she’d been missing.

Not without its detractors, Eat, Pray, Love became a worldwide smash hit phenomenon, spawning an industry of yoga vacations, the film starring Julia Roberts as Gilbert, and inspiring readers to take on their own ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ adventures.

In the intervening years, Gilbert has published another memoir, Committed, novel The Signature Of All Things, and Big Magic, about creativity (‘Creative living beyond fear’). She has become something of an evangelist for the messages of accepting vulnerability and embracing fear that are currently prominent on the be-your-best-self circuit. I know, for I am her friend on Facebook, and have often been prompted to reflect on maxims such as ‘Bad things happen to women who wait for good things to happen’ and ‘Not this’ (gloomy sea, gloomy sky).

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The tanned, bare legs at the lip of a body of water, skirt hiked up, on the cover of Susan Johnson’s The Landing say one thing, and that is SUMMER FICTION. Get ready, summer is nigh and with it summer reading, i.e., that special genre of book best enjoyed beachside with a floppy hat whilst the kids are busy but well cared for elsewhere.

The Landing commences with a Jane Austen-esque question: if Jonathan—recently single due to his wife leaving him for her, shock, female colleague*—is in possession of a good fortune, must he also be in want of a new wife? Jonathan intends out to find out, knowing full well that life alone is not for him. But he was also blindsided and left utterly confused by his wife Sarah’s departure. The rug has been pulled, and the minutia of Jonathan’s life is now suffused with this question.

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Tess is leaving. ‘It’s around three a.m. I can’t be sure exactly, because I’m hiding under a house, ten minutes’ drive out of Byron Bay, off the old Bangalow Road… I’m not cold. It’s still summer – just.’

Tess was seventeen when she travelled to Byron Bay for schoolies with a couple of friends. It was a break from the troubled years following the death of her father and desertion by her mother, events that had left her older sister, Beth, to lead a household of siblings. When Tess is offered a job in a Byron cafe and encounters the handsome, older Jay, she decides to stay. Four years on, Tess is trapped on a farm with Jay and their daughter, Nellie, with no job, money or friends.

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