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SUMMER READING

Hannah won awards and

fans with her 2013 debut

novel, Burial Rites

($14.99, Picador

Australia), about the trial

of Anges Magnúsdóttir,

the last woman executed

in Iceland. Set in 1829, its

compelling prose brings

Iceland’s formidable

landscape to life. Her new

book, The Good People,

($32.99, Picador Australia)

is set in south-west

Ireland in 1825, and tells

the fascinating tale of

three women brought

together by strange and

troubling events.

Parade in Melbourne, happily sagging under the weight of

years and the lives of my friends who lived in it, filling its

rooms with romantic angst and the aroma of cheap-and-cheerful

dinners. There was the apartment, glossy with tiles, in

Ayutthaya, Thailand, where geckos decorated the walls and I

washed my sweat-stained teacher’s clothes in a tiny sink under

a wall pinned with sweet and funny letters from my students.

There was the sharehouse in Fitzroy where I assiduously hid

all signs of my prohibited, stowaway cat who loved me with

fierce adoration. The cottage in the Adelaide Hills with unsealed

floorboards, which knifed me with cold every morning before

I lit the wood stove, and a garden I resuscitated from neglect.

A farmhouse surrounded by snow. A swag and a night sky that

swayed with moonlight.

All of these places have been home to me, not for where they

were or the amount of time I spent there, but because they

became places of belonging through friendship, love or the

quiet companionship of landscape.

The German writer Christian Morgenstern once wrote

that “Home is not where you live, it is where they understand

you.” The older I get, the more I recognise the truth of this

aphorism. Home is, I have discovered, more often a state of

being than a physical place.

We are at home when we may be ourselves, no questions

asked. Home is anywhere, any connection, any time where we

may be known and accepted and, dare I say it, loved. This is

also how, once homed ourselves, we might offer this same gift

to others: through understanding, and through letting them

know that they, too, belong. #

DON’T MISS

For more great reading,

pick up next month’s H&G

when singer/song-writer and

debut novelist Holly Throsby

reflects on her childhood

home on Sydney

Harbour.