 | Reviews of The Shallow End Ashley Sievwright Clouds of Magellan 2008 |
[This novel was shortlisted for the Best First Book award in the South East Asia and Pacific region of the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize.]
From the publisher's page:
It was one of the most perfect days, only just warm enough, an ever so slight breeze I could see in the hairs on my arm and in the flutter of the flags across each end of the pool but couldn't feel. It must have been the exact temperature of my blood.'ReviewsOn a cloudless afternoon, a man dives into a crowded swimming pool and disappears. Is it murder, a staged disappearance or alien abduction?
The Shallow End -- a steady freestyle commentary on sex, celebrity and suntanning.
Lou Swinn on 3RRR: "Ashley Sievwright is a really entertaining writer and this book is super easy to read. It's an internal story as much as anything, about loss and blame and guilt, and how people can pass in and out of other people's lives. There is plenty of philosophising on the ways that people communicate, and on how we point the blame, and about the way society operates...Sievwright has a nice way of putting things, and he builds this drama quietly and subtly, towards an interesting conclusion."
Diane Stubbings in "The Canberra Times": "The Shallow End offers a sharply amusing, often acerbic commentary on contemporary Australia, particularly in terms of the debilitating relationship that has developed between society and the media, a lack of critical engagement on one side and the veneration of the lowest common denominator on the other, working to the detriment of both."
Interviews
Richard Watts in "Canvas" magazine.
Scott Abrahams in "Southern Star".
