★How to be alone? What kind of life can a person lead in solitude?
★A new edition of Beverley Farmer’s out of print classic A Body of Water, first published in 1990.
★In its mixing of genres – essay, memoir, fiction, folk tale, this book opened up new frontiers for Australian literature.
★Winner of the Australian Book Design Award 2021: Best Designed Literary Fiction Cover

The innovative qualities of A Body of Water were further developed in Farmer’s subsequent works The Bone House and This Water: Five Tales.

A Body of Water was first published thirty years ago. The writing of the book takes place over a year, and portrays a complete cycle in the writer’s life. It begins on her forty-sixth birthday, in a period of emotional inhibition and loneliness – her marriage has broken down, and she is living on her own. By the end of the cycle the narrator has written short stories and poems, which are included in the book, alongside essays about the writing process, journal entries, excerpts from books she has been reading, spiritual meditations, and finely detailed observations of the life around her.

The title A Body of Water could be taken to refer to the book’s settings along the Bellarine Peninsula in southern Victoria, with its bays, the outer harbour, and the lighthouse, standing like a sentinel at the entrance to the ocean. It also suggests the diverse material which fills the book, like a body of water with all that it contains and nurtures. Throughout, one is aware of the writer’s own body, as an entity which shifts its identity like water, with its changes of mood, relationships and reflections.

Beverley Farmer (1941–2018)
Beverley Farmer was the author of four collections of short stories, including Milk, which won the NSW Premier’s Award for Fiction, and the writer’s notebook, A Body of Water. She was also the writer of the novels Alone, The Seal Woman and The House in the Light, this last title being shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. The Bone House, a collection of essays on the life of the body and the life of the mind, was published by Giramondo in 2005. This Water: Five Tales was longlisted for the 2018 Stella Prize. It was her last work of fiction.

Loss features as a central theme in Farmer's stories. She described it as the "touchstone" of her work.The "experience of being foreign" was also favoured.

Awards and nominations:
1984 – New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, Christina Stead Prize for Fiction for Milk
1996 – The House in the Light was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award
2009 – Patrick White Award
2018 – This Water was long-listed for The Stella Prize

Introduction vii
February 1987 7
March 21
April 57
A Drop of Water 69
May 89
Among Pigeons 93
June 103
Vase with Red Fishes 112
July 125
Black Genoa 141
August 153
September 165
October 179
November 211
December 237
January 257
February 285
Land of Snows 303
Sources 315