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.
Brilliantly captures both the prickly detail and the slow geological shifts of family life. It is an intricate, intimate novel – and utterly humane. — Anna Smaill
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, The Pantograph Punch
Tracy Farr’s quietly brilliant second novel … is an accomplished, immersive, moving book. Highly recommended. — Catherine Robertson, NZ Listener
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
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
[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
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
Editions/availability
The Hope Fault (Gallic Books, 2018)
International release (excl. Aus/NZ), in paperback and e-book
Details from Gallic Books
The Hope Fault (Fremantle Press, 2017)
Australia, New Zealand, in paperback and e-book
Details from Fremantle Press
Dopo la pioggia (UnoRosso/Parallelo45 Edizioni, 2018)
Italy, in paperback
Details from Parallelo45 Edizioni
More information
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