The Hope Fault – Tracy Farr

PUBLISHED BY

AU/NZ 2017 / Fremantle Press

UK/US 2018 / Gallic Books (Aardvark Bureau)

ITALY 2018 / UnoRosso/Parallelo45 Edizioni

The minutiae and messiness of family life as it comes together and unravels time and time again are delicately rendered in Tracy Farr’s second novel, The Hope Fault.

Iris flicks the car’s headlights on, even though it’s not long past midday. There’s no rain yet, but you can feel it in the air, smell it coming. When they’d left the city that morning, they’d driven three hours south in midwinter sunshine, under skies of unbroken blue. Then just out of Cassetown they drove in under a thick dark cloud that filled the whole of the sky to the south, and turned the day dusk-dark.

In Cassetown, Geologue Bay, Iris and her extended family — her ex-husband and his wife and their new baby; her son and her best friend’s daughter — gather on a midwinter long weekend, to pack up the family holiday house now that it has been sold. They are together for one last time, one last weekend, one last party.

The Hope Fault is a celebration of the everyday complexities of family: aunties and steps and exes, and a baby in need of a name; parents and partners who are missing, and the people who replace them.

It’s about the faultlines that run under the surface, and it’s about anxiety and uncertainty — the unsettling notion that the earth might shift, literally or metaphorically, at any moment. It’s a contemporary novel that plays with time and with ways of telling stories. It finds poetry and beauty in science, and pattern and magic in landscape.

Adapted for the stage by Andrew Hale for Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA); world premiere at WAAPA in 2019
Published internationally in English
Published in Italian as Dopo la pioggia

Reviews

Pip Adam

Farr uses space, time and sensual experience to pull off some impressive extreme craft sport in this book; the result is a compassionate and affecting novel that explores the play between our internal and external lives.

– Pip Adam in The Pantograph Punch

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DURA

Tracy Farr’s elegant and pensive novel … honours the force of the fault lines that run through the earth, through humanity, and through our genealogy. … Through the complex characters of a broken and fused family, Farr explores the acceptance and embracing of ever moving fault lines and familial structures.

– Dundee University Review of the Arts

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ABR

The minutiae and messiness of family life as it comes together and unravels time and time again are delicately rendered in Tracy Farr’s second novel, The Hope Fault. The unrelenting rain that forms the lugubrious backdrop for much of the novel conjures up the same rich, atmospheric setting of the late Georgia Blain’s Between a Wolf and a Dog …

– Sonia Nair, Australian Book Review

Herkt

It is a novel [that] has a gravity and a weight. It is dense with sensation and thought. The small moments of existence are turned to catching the light. Farr is a master of describing a situation and teasing out its origins.

– David Herkt

Books and Pub

[The Hope Fault] echoes the thoughtfulness of Jessie Cole’s Deeper Water, with its literary reflection on the geography of family, and the way domestic life can be invaded and divided.

– Books + Publishing

Foreword Reviews

Tracy Farr’s carefully crafted literary novel The Hope Fault explores what family means when it’s placed beside the weight of history. […] The Hope Fault is a riveting novel that elegantly achieves a vision of family and history that lingers beyond the page.

– Foreword Reviews, starred review

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New Zealand

all e-book formats

Australia

Interviews and more

Audio – The Hope Fault – New writing

RNZ’s Lynn Freeman asks Tracy about her second novel, The Hope Fault, bringing an extended family together in a house that’s up for sale.

Q&A with Tracy Farr – The Hope Fault, and the origins of Wonderland

Ahead of the US release of The Hope Fault, writer, editor, book blogger and ex-journalist Deborah Kalb asked Tracy to answer some questions about the novel. Deborah asked Tracy about her writing process, long-lost manuscripts, where characters come from, endings – and why Tracy’s next novel (the 2025-published Wonderland) is about triplets. Read Q&A with Tracy Farr

Playlist – The Hope Fault Redux 2018

Here’s a playlist created for the 2018 UK/US launch of The Hope Fault – songs of water and rain* for this rainy, midwinter novel.

*and houses and homes, time and memory, and songs for the novel’s characters.

Video – Tracy Farr introduces The Hope Fault

In this short video, made for Gallic Books ahead of UK and US publication in 2018, Tracy introduces The Hope Fault, and talks a little about ideas in the novel, and its origins.