Exploded View
Carrie Tiffany
Must a girl always be a part?
How can she become a whole?
In the late 1970s, in the forgotten outer suburbs, a girl has her hands in the engine of a Holden. A sinister new man has joined the family. He works as a mechanic and operates an unlicensed repair shop at the back of their block.
The family is under threat. The girl reads the Holden workshop manual for guidance. She resists the man with silence, then with sabotage. She fights him at the place where she believes his heart lives – in the engine of the car.
Spare, poetic and intensely visual, Exploded View is the powerful new novel from the author of Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living and Mateship with Birds – one of Australia’s most celebrated writers and winner of the inaugural Stella Prize.
andExploded View
‘Exploded View…(is) a measured, poetic focus on the small details in nature, roads and relationships.’
‘Exploded View has all the exhilaration of a revved-up Holden’
‘This tense novel, held tightly with elegant restraint, is hard to read for the best possible reasons. It asks a lot of its reader, but it offers the most satisfying rewards.’
‘Superbly controlled, like dark, secret music rising from an abyss.’
‘This is Tiffany’s triumph…her prose has the alert, truncated poetry of a preternatural wise child—lyrical without being florid, clear-sighted by unhappy with that early knowledge…It’s title might suggest splintering of focus, but the line drawn in Exploded View is unwavering, tragic, and heads straight down.
‘Exploded View is an offbeat coming-of-age story…there is hardly a detail that does not reverberate beyond itself, evoke some deeper implication.
‘This is a powerful book and can’t be ignored.’
‘An adolescent girl’s terrifying tale of family life; I have never read a novel like Exploded View.’
‘Tiffany pulls off something remarkable here: erecting a narrative structure almost buckling under its own weight, but that ultimately holds up. Challenging and devastating, this is an important read.
‘This is a very different novel to Tiffany’s early books…The language is glitter, angrier and focalised exquisitely through this girl’s perspective.
‘Carrie Tiffany’s third novel…As spare as a poem, as potent as a depth charge.’
‘Both poetic and relentlessly dark in tone…with not a word wasted.’
‘If you’re a fan of Australian literature, this one is not to be missed.’
‘The distinctive qualities that made her two previous novels so successful—an original perspective, odd characters, earthy language—emerge quickly from Exploded View, like wildflowers cracking through bitumen…Tiffany writes this portrait of a girl on the brink of womanhood with great subtlety…[T]here’s much to learn from this girl and from the compassion, power and beauty of the author’s fine writing.‘
‘The language shifts and soars…’
‘[A] densely interior novel, narrated in vignettes that are rhythmic, often poetic, sparse and compressed…Tiffany’s control of [the novel’s] voice is masterful. It is thrilling, even exhilarating at times, to read.’
‘An ending to make your jaw unhinge.’
