Ceridwen Dovey

From award-winning novelist Ceridwen Dovey, a collection of linked short stories as innovative and beautifully written as Nam Le's The Boat.

Only the Animals

Eliza Bell

After sharing their artistic frustrations at the school gate, Ceridwen Dovey and Eliza Bell decide to take a risk: to co-write a book about early motherhood. Off-colour, offbeat, off their heads, they begin - but then, what is motherhood if not messy, non-linear, multi-authored and potty mouthed?What results is songs, memoir, fiction, drama, poetry, letters, pregnant and lactating AI assistants texting each other. Together, Dovey and Bell create a collage of absurd mothering, failing mothering and moving mothering. They salvage the scraps of each other's lives to imagine themselves into a future where women don't always have to choose between Art and Motherhood.After all: these mothers are tired. They are busy. They are lucky. They talk. Perform. Categorise. Clown. They do sad dinner cabaret. They do heroic odyssey. They do motherhood the musical. They do it badly, they do it well, they do it and they do it, and they keep on doing it as women do: comically, communally, creatively. No bells and whistles, no false cheer. Motherhood as a fever-dream fantasia, a poker-faced, tragic extravaganza.Funny, thoughtful, vulnerable and disturbingly familiar, Mothertongues up-ends a genre and speaks motherhood anew.

Mothertongues

"Originally published in 2018 by Hamish Hamiltion, an imprint of Penguin Books, Australia"--Title page verso.

A Novel

In the Garden of the Fugitives

‘A sublime gem of a novel’ Hannah Kent, author of Burial Rites Fifteen years after graduating from Harvard, five close friends on the cusp of middle age are still pursuing an elusive happiness and wondering if they’ve wasted their youthful opportunities. Mariam and Rowan, who married young, are struggling with the demands of family life and starting to regret prioritising meaning over wealth in their careers. Jules, already a famous actor when she arrived on campus, is changing in mysterious ways but won’t share what is haunting her. Eloise, now a professor who studies the psychology of happiness, is troubled by her younger wife’s radical politics. And Jomo, founder of a luxury jewellery company, has been carrying an engagement ring around for months, unsure whether his girlfriend is the one. The soul searching begins in earnest at their much-anticipated college reunion weekend on the Harvard campus, when the most infamous member of their class, Frederick – senior advisor and son of the recently elected and loathed US President – turns up dead. Old friends often think they know everything about one another, but time has a way of making us strangers to those we love – and to ourselves...

Life After Truth

In a military coup that overthrows a nameless nation's president, three of his servants - his barber, chef, and portraitist - are taken hostage, and their true loyalties are revealed.

Blood Kin

Once More With Feeling

Nós, humanos, achamos que somos o máximo. Mas o que temos feito com o nosso mundo? SÓ OS ANIMAIS SALVAM é um livro que tenta responder a essa pergunta de maneira inusitada. Cada um de seus contos é uma fábula moderna — narrada pela alma de um animal envolvido em mais um dos incontáveis conflitos e guerras humanas ao longo do último século — e suas espantosas e formidáveis histórias de vida e morte. Escrito de maneira primorosa, ao mesmo tempo divertida e comovente, SÓ OS ANIMAIS SALVAM é uma notável façanha literária de uma das vozes mais interessantes da literatura contemporânea australiana. Um formidável ponto de vista animal de nós, humanos, no que temos de pior, de mais violento e brutal, mas também de melhor, com nossa imaginação, criatividade, afeto e superação. Em meio ao caos, os animais conseguem encontrar esperança e inspiração em uma das atividades mais significativas que nossa espécie já criou: a literatura. CONHEÇA AS FÁBULAS: Em uma trincheira na Frente Ocidental durante a Primeira Guerra, um gato recorda as façanhas teatrais de sua proprietária, a escritora, atriz, jornalista e mímica Colette. Um cachorro busca pela Iluminação budista durante a Alemanha nazista. Uma tartaruga russa que pertenceu a família de Tolstói acaba parando nas mãos de Virginia Woolf na Londres sob os bombardeios alemães na Segunda Guerra, antes de acabar na casa de George Orwell na época em que ele escrevia A Revolução dos Bichos e, mais tarde, participar da corrida espacial durante a Guerra Fria. Um urso faminto à beira da morte narra contos de fadas no cerco a Sarajevo, durante a guerra que desmantelou a Iugoslávia nos anos 1990. Um golfinho enviado ao Iraque pela Marinha americana escreve uma carta para a escritora Sylvia Plath...

Só os animais salvam

What does it feel like to be passionate about your daily work? How do people find their way into fascinating, unusually fulfilling careers, even against the odds? Space lawyers and bibliotherapists; euthanasia activists and women's rugby champions; shark experts and solar power visionaries; a master perfumer and a moon dust maven, among many others. What all of these people have in common is the courage to pursue their dreams and obsessions, no matter how niche or particular, and transform them into their life's work. In the process, they've enacted lasting change in the world around them. Delving into the working lives of others for publications as diverse as newyorker.com, The Monthly and WIRED, Ceridwen Dovey's inquisitive, thoughtful approach has allowed her to explore fields of knowledge and expertise that are often inaccessible to outsiders. The resulting profiles are a celebration of the extraordinary and meaningful work done by those on paths less travelled.

Inner Worlds Outer Spaces

'A sublime gem of a novel' Hannah Kent, author of Burial Rites Fifteen years after graduating from Harvard, five close friends on the cusp of middle age are still pursuing an elusive happiness and wondering if they've wasted their youthful opportunities. Mariam and Rowan, who married young, are struggling with the demands of family life and starting to regret prioritising meaning over wealth in their careers. Jules, already a famous actor when she arrived on campus, is changing in mysterious ways but won't share what is haunting her. Eloise, now a professor who studies the psychology of happiness, is troubled by her younger wife's radical politics. And Jomo, founder of a luxury jewellery company, has been carrying an engagement ring around for months, unsure whether his girlfriend is the one. The soul-searching begins in earnest at their much-anticipated college reunion weekend on the Harvard campus, when the most infamous member of their class, Frederick - senior advisor and son of the recently elected and loathed US President - turns up dead. Old friends often think they know everything about one another, but time has a way of making us strangers to those we love - and to ourselves...

Shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize A chef, a portraitist and a barber are taken hostage in a coup to overthrow their boss, the President. They are held captive in the President's summer residence in the mountains while far below them, the capital swelters as chaos reigns. Meanwhile, the chef's daughter, the portraitist's pregnant wife and the barber's lover await their own fates, their love as dangerous a liability as any political affiliation. In her stunning debut novel, award-winning author Ceridwen Dovey reveals how humanity's most atavistic impulses – vanity, vengeance and greed – seethe, relentlessly, just beneath the surface of civilization. 'A story about how the lightest taste of power so easily stimulates our limitless appetite for sadism. Dovey . . . presents her case so meticulously and relentlessly that you've got to respect her authority. New York Times Sunday Book Review 'A lovely, haunting novel, written with great care and precision . . . a really fine debut.' Colum McCann, author of Let The Great World Spin 'A meticulously constructed story about political corruption and its impact on people's lives . . . ingenious.' Sydney Morning Herald

Perhaps only the animals can tell us what it is to be human The souls of ten animals caught up in human conflicts over the last century and connected to both famous and little-known writers in surprising ways tell their astonishing stories of life and death. In a trench on the Western Front, a cat recalls her owner Colette's theatrical antics in Paris. In Nazi Germany, a dog seeks enlightenment. A Russian tortoise once owned by the Tolstoys drifts in space during the Cold War. During the Siege of Sarajevo, a starving bear tells a fairy tale. And a dolphin sent to Iraq by the U.S. Navy writes a letter to Sylvia Plath. Exquisitely written, playful, and poignant, Ceridwen Dovey's Only the Animals is a remarkable literary achievement by one of our brightest young writers. An animal's-eye-view of humans at our brutal, violent worst and our creative, imaginative best, it asks us to find our way back to empathy not only for animals but for other people, and to believe again in the redemptive power of reading and writing fiction.

Stories

Rarely does a debut novel attract the sweeping critical acclaim of Ceridwen Dovey's Blood Kin. Shortlisted for two prestigious awards, this tale centers around a military coup in an unnamed country, with characters who have no names or any identifying physical characteristics. Known simply as the ex-President's chef, barber, and portrait painter, these three men perform their mundane tasks and appear unaware of the atrocities of their employer's regime. But when the President is deposed, the trio are revealed as less than innocent. A deeply chilling yet sensual novel, Blood Kin illustrates Lord Acton's famous quip, "Absolute power corrupts absolutely," and marks the beginning of an illustrious literary career.

After sharing their artistic frustrations at the school gate, two women decide to take a risk: to co-write a book about early motherhood. Off-colour, offbeat, off their heads, they begin – but then, what is motherhood if not messy, non-linear, multi-authored and potty mouthed? Together they gather scenes and songs, poems and text messages, insights and ephemera, alive to both the playfulness and the danger of co-creation. From the salvaged scraps of their daily lives they make an intimate collage of absurd mothering, failing mothering and moving mothering, imagining themselves into a future where women don’t always have to choose between art and motherhood. After all: these mothers are tired. They are busy. They are lucky. They talk. Perform. Categorise. Clown. They do sad dinner cabaret. They do heroic odyssey. They do motherhood the musical. No bells and whistles, no false cheer. They do it badly, they do it well, they do it and they do it, and they keep on doing it as women do: comically, communally, creatively. Funny, thoughtful, vulnerable and disturbingly familiar, Mothertongues up-ends ideas of genre and speaks motherhood anew.

‘I was born in the year J.M. Coetzee published his third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians. My mother read this dark, disturbing book with its multiple scenes of torture as she breastfed me at night, while my older sister slept and the house was quiet. It was 1980. The apartheid government had declared a state of emergency in the face of growing internal revolt, and my parents were thinking of leaving South Africa again.’ For Ceridwen Dovey, J.M. Coetzee has ‘always been there’, ‘challenging the rest of us to keep up, resisting our attempts to pin him down.’ Her mother wrote the first critical study of Coetzee’s early novels, uncovering their startlingly original ways of bringing together literature and politics. With tenderness and insight, Dovey draws on this family history to explore the Nobel Prize–winner’s work.

Ceridwen Dovey

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