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  • Published: 1 September 2010
  • ISBN: 9781742741222
  • Imprint: Random House Australia
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 304

After the Fire, A Still Small Voice




The acclaimed debut novel from the 2014 Miles Franklin Award-winning author

The acclaimed debut novel from the 2014 Miles Franklin Award-winning author

Following the breakdown of a turbulent relationship, Frank moves from Canberra to a shack on the east coast once owned by his grandparents. There, among the sugar cane and sand dunes, he struggles to rebuild his life. Forty years earlier, Leon is growing up in Sydney, turning out treacle tarts at his parents’ bakery and flirting with one of the local girls. But when he’s conscripted as a machine-gunner in Vietnam, he finds himself suddenly confronting the same experiences that haunt his war-veteran father. As these two stories weave around each other - each narrated in a voice as tender as it is fierce - we learn what binds together Frank and Leon, and what may end up keeping them apart.

  • Published: 1 September 2010
  • ISBN: 9781742741222
  • Imprint: Random House Australia
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 304

About the author

Evie Wyld

Evie Wyld grew up in Australia and the UK. She is part owner of Review, a small independent bookshop in London. Her first novel, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and a Betty Trask Award. In 2011 she was listed as one of the Culture Show’s Best New British Novelists. She was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. In 2013 she was listed as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. Evie’s second novel, All the Birds, Singing, was published in 2013. It won the 2014 Miles Franklin Award, the Encore Award and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, and was longlisted for the 2014 Stella Prize and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, and shortlisted for the Costa Novel Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her third novel, The Bass Rock, won the 2021 Stella Prize. Her graphic novel with illustrator Joe Sumner, Everything Is Teeth, was published in 2015.

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Praise for After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

Just sometimes a book is so complete, so compelling and potent, that you are fearful of breaking its hold.

Daily Mail UK

Wyld has a feel both for beauty and for the ugliness of inherited pain.

New Yorker

...the best Australian literary novel I've read this year.

The Age

Exquisitely written

Canberra Times

It's no surprise that Evie Wyld is being mentioned in Britain in the same breath as Tim Winton and Peter Carey.

Sunday Tasmanian

It's not often that I fall for a novel from the very first page, but the controlled and expressive opening to Evie Wyld's AFTER THE FIRE, A STILL SMALL VOICE is utterly irresistible. It is never short of wonderful.

The Guardian

A sad and lovely novel from a talented new writer.

The Observer

A stunning new work from a brilliant new voice.

Esquire

At times startling, Wyld's book is ruminative and dramatic, with deep reserves of empathy colored by masculine rage and repression.

Publishers Weekly