Nicole Sinclair’s short fiction and non-fiction has appeared in the Review of Australian Fiction, Westerly, indigo Journal and Award Winning Australian Writing, and also forms part of the artworks along Busselton Jetty. Her short stories have won the Katharine Susannah Prichard Short Fiction Award and the Down South Writers Competition. Bloodlines is Nicole’s first novel and was shortlisted for the 2014 TAG Hungerford Award. Nicole has lived and worked in Papua New Guinea and now lives in the south-west of Western Australia with her husband and two (very young) daughters.
BY THIS AUTHOR
-
Bloodlines
$27
You make the best choices you can at the time Beth, knowing you’ll never have to live this life again.’ Val shakes her head, her voice cracks. ‘You’d never want to.’ Thirty-one-year-old Beth, who’s grown up in Western Australia’s wheatbelt, is running from her past when she heads to an island in Papua New Guinea. Interwoven with Beth’s narrative about the joys and brutalities of island life is the story of her parents' passionate, tender love for each other. But Clem and Rose’s union is beset with tragedy, forever marking the lives of those around them.
BLOG POSTS BY Nicole Sinclair
I've just returned from the Perth Writers Festival where it was wonderful to speak about Bloodlines. There were other fledgling writers in the audience, and they asked, how did I do it? How did I pull off writing a novel?
Ten years ago, I left teaching to travel and do volunteer work abroad, and I planned to honour my childhood dream of writing a novel. Yet, ironically, even though I had more ‘free time’ I never actually started. It wasn’t until I undertook a PhD in writing that I began to hone my focus on…
From the window, she stares down at the people clumped under trees, or sitting on the back of utes. She watches women walk along the muddy street in their bright, puffing meri blouses, billums stuffed with kaukau, taro, yam. Mangy dogs run by, nipping at each other, head toward the beach. ‘What do they do…
Barefoot, toes digging into brown dirt, I survey the old tin milking shed and cobbled-together chook yards … all empty now. Large white turkey feathers have gathered along the fence line, and curl over like small waves, ruffling in the breeze. I look over to where dad kept his dog. Gone. Then down the hill:…