Distributed by: Consortium/Perseus Book Sales & Distribution
ISBN: 978-0-7145-3148-9
Price: $15.95
Original Trade Paperback: 310 pages
Publication Date: September 2008
Trim Size: 8.5 x 5.5
Feather Man
Set in Brisbane, Australia, during the stultifying 1950s, and moving to the grubby London of the 1970s, Feather Man is about Sooky, who, ignored by her parents, is encouraged to make herself scarce and visit Lionel, the farmer next door—there, an incident will take place that will impact the rest of her life.
Against the backdrop of rural Australia and the London art world, McMaster meticulously paints the landscapes of Sooky's internal and external worlds through a narrator that brings to mind Scout of To Kill a Mockingbird.
Following Sooky from her neglected childhood to womanhood and her entry into the art world, the book combines comedy with emotional intensity. When Sooky's attraction to Redmond leads her to London, her past follows her into the future in a deadly confrontation.
- Winner, the Barbara Jefferis Literary Award
Rhyll McMaster, born 1947, started writing poetry while a child. Washing the Money won the Victorian Premier's Prize and the Grace Leven Prize. Her poems have been broadcast on national radio and television, in Australia. Feather Man is her first novel.
"McMaster achieves many brilliant effects...a tour de force of vivid and surprising imagery and allusion....Her eye for detail, for recognizing the exceptional in the most mundane of things, illuminates these pages. The seedy ordinariness of life in London is superbly conveyed."
"I think [Feather Man] is quite wonderful. Beautifully written. Engrossing and utterly involving and is does something new"
"Rhyll McMaster tosses us in at the deep end...enlivened by a genuine mystery, a slender but powerful narrative thread....It's a masterstroke...she makes this novel so much more than a simple story: in the clever patterns of imagery, the brilliant descriptions, the narrative structure and the understanding—more and more absent from contemporary fiction—that a good novel has something to say about the world."
"...a novel which explores the impact of childhood sexual abuse on adult life...a brutal tale, but an exquisite read, full of the most satisfying psychological truths."
"...a well-structured and accomplished character-driven work...a flowing, subtle and rewarding read."
"...I think it would be a good choice for book clubs as there can be different reactions both to the adventures and the structure of the story."
"...an exhilarating and absorbing work of prose..."
"McMaster is interested in the fragility of identity and the dynamics of personal power. This superb first novel is beautifully written but not for the faint-hearted....in a class of its own."
—Christina Hill, Australian Book Review, July-August, 2007
"...a novel about privacy, about an experience so secret and so traumatically internalized that its effects go on reverberating long after the child victim has grown up. In tracing Sooky's progress from a traumatized suburban childhood to the beginnings of a successful international career as an artist, McMaster charts the emotional complexities of dependence, loyalty, cruelty and betrayal..."
"Feather Man is boldly original and self-assured. The narrative voice is darkly witty, but beguilingly honest. Nothing is sugar-coated here...Sooky is the consummate loner, albeit a girl with guts and a sense of irony"
"A highly original first novel..."
"In Feather Man Rhyll McMaster has written a love-letter to the physical landscape of Brisbane. The intimate and panoramic are in equally sharp focus: the beauty and mastery of each is undeniable."
"The writing is impeccable...and the descriptions are truly memorable and repellent. Like Sooky, this is not a scene we can easily leave behind. The descriptions of the art she creates are particularly vivid: confessional and sometimes surreal...a coming-of-age novel, and a story of an emergent artist."