From her first novel, The Morality of Gentlemen (1984), Amanda Lohrey represented a unique, intriguing, and necessary voice in Australian literature. As Julieanne Lamond’s study Lohrey traces, she was both part of but distinct from the 1980s boom in Australian women’s writing and has gone on to produce a diverse oeuvre of novels, short stories journalism, and nonfiction that captures late twentieth and early twenty-first century Australian life – texts that ‘chronicle the forces that shape intimate and social experience in the contemporary world’ (Lamond 1). Surprisingly, Lohrey’s work has received comparatively scant critical attention, with much of it focused on the controversial pulping of The Reading Group in 1989, making this first monograph on Lohrey a welcome and much needed addition to Australian literary studies and studies of contemporary women writers.
Lohrey is part of the Miegunyah Press’s Contemporary Australian Writers series, joining the Cambria Australian Literature book series…