‘Farmer uses language arrestingly, and is arrested by it, and imparts this throughout to her reader.’ Sara Dowse

‘An extraordinarily gifted and original talent’ The Age

‘Farmer’s prose, plangently beautiful and vivid with seashore and season, like poetry, invites dipping into and savouring again and again.’ Katharine England

‘As she explores the frailty of emotional experience, Farmer places her characters in a luminous domain of elemental sensual experience…’ Cassandra Pybus

★Long-listed for The Stella Prize.
★Simplified Chinese rights has been sold.
★The last work of fiction by Beverley Farmer, one of Australia’s great prose stylists, and a pioneer of women’s writing in this country.
★A collection of five interwoven tales, three of them novellas. Each has a woman at its centre: in each the women speak, act, think for themselves, in opposing or escaping from an oppressive authority.

One tale, set on the south coast of Victoria, is animated by the legend of the Great Silkie; another finds its rebellious princess in Lake Annaghmakerrig in Ireland; a third has Clytemnestra as its central figure, mourning the daughter sacrificed by her husband Agamemnon so that he could go to war with Troy – surely one of the great laments in Australian literature.

References to water and stone, ice and fire, light and darkness are woven throughout the collection, as are figures and images from myth and fairy tale – kings and brides, swans and seals, a ring of gold, ‘the blood red of her silks’ – their power evoked by repetition and resonance, and the remarkable rhythms of Farmer’s language.

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