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Our Book of the Month for February 2010 is ‘The Women in Black’ by Madeleine St John. Join our Book Club moderator, Barbara Sungaila, when we discuss this book at the Book Club forum at AWO Connect, from mid-February 2010. To participate in the discussion, you will be required to open a FREE account at AWO Connect, where you can also join in our book club discussions and blog about your favourite books and authors.
Written by a superb novelist of contemporary manners, The Women in Black is a fairytale which illuminates the extraordinariness of ordinary lives. The women in black are run off their feet, what with the Christmas rush and the summer sales that follow. But it’s Sydney in the 1950s, and there’s still just enough time left on a hot and frantic day to dream and scheme…
By the time the last marked-down frock has been sold, most of the staff of the Ladies’ Cocktail section at F. G. Goode’s have been launched into slightly different careers. With the lightest touch and the most tender of comic instincts, Madeleine St John conjures a vanished summer of innocence. The Women in Black is a great novel and a lost Australian classic.
The Women in Black by Madeleine St John was published by Text Publishing in March 2009 (RRP AU$29.95).
About Madeleine St John
Madeleine St John was born in Sydney. She graduated from Sydney University in 1963 and lived in London for most of the succeeding years, until her death in 2006. The Women in Black is her first novel. She also wrote A Pure Clear Light, 1996, The Essence of the Thing, 1997, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Stairway to Paradise, 1999.