5.0 out of 5 based on 1 reviews. – Customer review on 16/11/2011

Fans of Alex Miller’s Lovesong will be pleased to find another love story at the heart of Autumn Laing. As the last surviving member of her once-thriving artistic circle, 85-year-old Autumn is moved to write about her affair with Australian artist Patrick Donlon and the near-catastrophic effects their relationship had on those closest to them. The story skips from present to past, each of Autumn’s written reflections interspersed with comments from her cantankerous older self as she struggles with guilt, loss and the debilities of age. It can be hard to maintain tension across such a disjointed narrative, but for the most part Miller handles it well. He tends to foreshadow the emotional impact of events long before describing the events themselves, which renders the final chapters somewhat anticlimactic. However, his characters are masterfully drawn, and his portrayal of the older Autumn in particular is compassionate yet gently amusing. While this novel is principally concerned with the complexities of human relationships, it is also a fascinating evocation of colonial Australia, when the land was still seen as ‘unwritten’ and artists and intellectuals were struggling to articulate an identity separate from Europe. Alex Miller is living proof of their success.