Marion Halligan, winner of the Nita Kibble Literary Award and Age Book of the Year Award for Fiction, has a new novel, Valley of Grace, in the bookshops. The author is interviewed in "The Courier-Mail" by Christopher Bantick.
Given that Valley of Grace began as a short story, the development of the characters is patiently paced and methodical. This is a marker of how Halligan works. She wants her readers to know her characters well before she introduces the thematic concerns."All my novels are really a set of short stories. This was very evident in Lovers' Knots, which was a family saga with all the boring bits left out. I can see this in Valley of Grace, where we have a set of characters. We all live our lives like this. We are the heroes of our own stories but we're the small players in others stories as well.
"The way I had structured the novel, there are a set of characters with their own roles, and yet roles in other peoples' lives. They are all knotted together. It is a technique that I love.
"There is a linear narrative movement in Valley of Grace where there is a beginning and resolution at the end. But it is essentially the knotting up in the middle that really interests me.
"There are several kinds of relationships here and one of the things strongly evoked, besides the desire to have babies, is the importance of sex in the story."
