William Lane

Consisting of Poems, Religious and Moral ...

The Gleanings of the Seventy-third Vintage

She wanted to photograph time: everything lost to time, and everything returned by it. Anna grows up in a third-storey unit in Parramatta with her adoptive Russian mother Sophia. When her teacher Miss Glass gives her a Box Brownie camera, small acts of observation coupled with the art of photography become her escape. On visiting the suburb of Castle Hill with her schoolfriend Lisaveta she falls into a seductive world of gardens and orchards. At the Thompson's place she embarks on a mission to photograph the orchard by night and day. It is there she meets Friedrich an older man, of German origin but from the Soviet Union, who lives in a shed on the property. She eventually learns that he was once a celebrated writer, his ambitions destroyed by the war. As events unfold Anna realises that her connections to the orchard and to Fredrich are deeper than she ever could have imagined. The mysteries and secrets of the past unfold in the most shocking, tender and unexpected of ways. Set in Sydney, and Russia, Past Life is a glorious novel about the various ways the gifts and traumas of the past play out in the present. It is the affecting story of relationships across generations and William Lane's most hauntingly beautiful work to date. 'Throughout this moving narrative, the traumas and triumphs of the past transform in the light of letters, poems, novels, paintings, photographs, dreams, and memories. Developing with the eerie precision of a photographic plate, old wars, lost loves, swim into view, then intersect, blossom, fade -- and take on new meaning.' -- Carmel Bird

Past Life

Canadian Stage Theatre Archives (University of Guelph)

Toronto Free Theatre Archives (University of Guelph)

Martin Kinch

Toronto Free Theatre

The Brides of Dracula

‘This is the shape-shifting detail of life, the tiny horrible and beautiful things we don't notice until fever or trauma stop us in our tracks; Lane has pulled them from the depths of our psyche and written them into a story of family that shifts and tilts the world we know. Dreamlike, nightmarish, unforgettable.’ - Jane Rawson, author of A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists and Formaldehyde At its heart, The Salamanders is a love story. Arthur lives in a hut by the Hawkesbury River, the detritus of suburban life gradually encroaching. When Rosie, the adopted daughter of his fathers' second wife returns from England to visit. their time together raises childhood memories of their father Peregrine, a famous and controversial artist, and what happened at a holiday by the ocean years ago. Rosie, Arthur and Peregrine are characters the reader will find it hard to let go of and this is also a subtle, affecting novel of ideas. With poetic, hallucinatory power, Lane explores how art can become life, how we as adults cannot truly escape the past and the influence of our parents, and how we might embrace the intensity and beauty of the moment as we journey towards reconciliation.

A Novel

The Salamanders

William Lane

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