The Buried Life, my new novel, is about to be released (Transit Lounge, March). It will be launched by Mark Rubbo of Readings Books on March 11th, at the Abbotsford Convent Melbourne. In addition to the conversation with Mark, Frances Atkins, will play music from Mahler. (Mahler’s music figures in the novel.)

Bookings for the launch can be made through the Readings website, click onto events.

The Buried Life began with a desire to explore that great taboo, death. It has always surprised me that a human event which happens to us all inspires so much fear. As for dying as a process, it strikes me as oxymoronic. One LIVES right up until the time one dies. I have sat with 4 people in the hours before each of them died, and they lived, even unconscious they lived up until their breath stopped. Epicurus expressed it best: Where life is, death is not. And where death is, life is not. As for suffering a death, it is suffered by the living, by those who are left behind.

This is not to suggest there’s no mystery in death. An abundant cache of poetry and music, samples of which are included in The Buried Life, is testimony to death’s enduring mysteries.

I have a 9-page document of death books and poems. Here are a few of my favourites.
Dylan Thomas: Do Not Go Gentle.
Neruda: The Dead Woman (this was quoted in the film Truly Madly Deeply)
Larkin: Aubade
Ted Hughes: The Crow Poems and Birthday Letters
Tennyson: In Memoriam A.H.H. (Arthur Hallam)
Hölderin: The Death of Empedocles (on Etna) (Also Matthew Arnold’s version) 
Edward Hirsch: Gabriel
Douglas Dunne: Elegies

It’s not surprising that the first character of The Buried Life to emerge was Adrian Moore, 43 years old, a scholar of the social and cultural aspects of death. His life has been shaped by the early deaths of his parents – although he would strenuously deny this.

His closest friend is Keziah, Kezi, 28 years old and estranged from her family and the fundamentalist community in which she was raised. She would like to bury her past in the way Adrian has, but it refuses to let her go.

Both Adrian and Kezi meet Laura Benady, a town planner in her late fifties, long married to a man Laura believes to be perfect.

As the novel grew, faith and fundamentalism, varieties of love, coercive control and the power of art all surface as Adrian, Laura and Kezi move through their lives – and the life of the novel.

One of the truly magical features of writing fiction – and reading it too – is that the imagination, when allowed time and space, will take you to unexpected places. A novel that began with death evolved to grapple with some of the great complexities and conundrums of life.