IN CONVERSATION
Peggy Frew - Wildflowers
3—4pm Sunday 11 September
Muse, East Hotel, Kingston Canberra ACT
Meet Peggy in conversation with The Canberra Times' Sally Pryor.
Tickets: $10 (entry only) // $40 entry + a discounted copy of the book (RRP$32.99)
A friendly suggestion for the safety and well-being of yourself and other patrons that although face masks are not required, they are strongly encouraged while attending the event.
Peggy Frew is a consummate observer of human frailty and fragile love, and in Wildflowers she has created a riveting, compassionate and affecting novel that is impossible to put down and even harder to forget.
Meg and Nina have been outshone by their younger sister Amber since childhood. They have become used to living on the margins of their parents' interest, used to others turning away from them and towards charismatic Amber.
But Amber's life has not gone the way they all thought it would, and now the three of them are together for the first time in years, on the road to a remote holiday rental in Far North Queensland, where Meg and Nina plan on helping Amber overcome her addiction. As good intentions gradually become terrifying reality, these sisters will test the limits of love and the line between care and control.
They were still who they always had been, still those sisters, but on this afternoon, in this car, driving with the windows down between cane fields under a deepening sky with purple cut-out mountains in the distance, they were wearing it so lightly, their bossiness and flakiness and wildness; they were wearing it like they used to, like it was supple, slippery, not completely fixed. Like it could be taken off.
Peggy Frew's first novel, House of Sticks, won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript by an Emerging Victorian Writer, and was shortlisted for the UTS Glenda Adams Prize for New Writing. Hope Farm, her second novel, won the Barbara Jefferis Award, was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Her third novel, Islands, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. She has been published in New Australian Stories 2, Kill Your Darlings, Meanjin and The Big Issue. Peggy is also a member of the critically acclaimed and award-winning Melbourne band Art of Fighting. Wildflowers is her fourth novel.
Sally Pryor is a born-and-bred Canberran, and features editor at The Canberra Times, where she has worked for more than a decade.
Venue
Muse, East Hotel
69 Canberra Ave, Kingston ACT
T: (02) 6178 0024