The Last Sky (Alice Nelson, Fremantle Press, $29.95 pb, ISBN 9781921361128, August) ***

Alice Nelson, who was shortlisted for the 2004 Australian/Vogel Award for Swimming Without Water is a literary writer. Her new novel The Last Sky is about stories and how they define us, but Nelson seems most entranced with language and writing. Set in Hong Kong, her descriptions of the city are superb, the tone one of sensuous melancholy. Maya, an Australian writer and academic, is in Hong Kong with her archaeologist husband Joseph. He is away doing fieldwork in China for much of the time, while she wanders the streets of this very foreign city. Maya befriends a Chinese bookseller who tells her a story about a Russian Jew with whom he’d been in love, and Maya’s re-imagining of Ada Lang’s life in Shanghai and Hong Kong forms an intriguing subplot. Through the stories Maya tells about others she slowly begins to understand her own story and her troubled marriage. But these stories are elliptical and not always satisfactory; this is not a novel for those who prefer a strong narrative. Maya is a humourless
protagonist, at times even dull, but for those who enjoy beautiful writing and an assured tone and mood, The Last Sky has much to offer.

Morgan Smith is the events manager at Gleebooks in Sydney

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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