APHELION, published by Picador Australia, 2007.
‘…reminiscent of Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News… Characters so interesting and unpredictable they keep you turning pages’ – Karin van Heerwaarden
“The last time being old and frail was this comical was in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.“ -The Age
‘Sad, funny, heartbreaking and uplifting all at once…An absolute must read.‘ -Wordpress
‘a beautiful novel, large in scope and ambition, and written in a poetic style that ennobles the mundane heartbreaks of its cast.’ – The Australian
“… this luscious novel chronicles a series of lives haunted by missed opportunities.“ -Good Reading Magazine
“Much more than the compelling story of an Australian town drowned in the name of progress and post-war reconstruction, Emily Ballou has placed – atop a robust narrative armature annealed with rich prose, descriptive passages and compelling detail – a fragile tapestry of great beauty interwoven with shining shards and sparkling gems of poetic language. Ballou’s words bespeak a true humanity observed. Aphelion is an unforgettable work of Australian literature.” -Felix Ratcliff
“Aphelion is funny without being smug, intelligent but not superior…The question of memory is at the heart of this book – how we mould and reshape it, how we forget and what we remember, and what we choose to emphasise as we tell our story.” -Louise Swinn The Age
Synopsis: Exiled by Love, Hazel Rey moves to the historic town of old Adaminaby. A victim of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, the town now lurks, gone but not forgotten, under the waters of Lake Eucumbene. There, on the shore of the lake, Hazel meets four generations of women sharing one house. Eighty-year-old Esme Windle waits patiently for her turn to die–but a daughter is not meant to go before her mother, and Esme’s ancients mother Hortense shows no signs of being finished with living. Esme’s niece Byrne and Byrne’s daughter, the widowed Lucetta, are succumbing to their own lonely fate. All four seem destined to live in a perpetual aphelion, pulled down by dark regrets and lost love.
But when young Rhett Davys returns to his abandoned family home after the death of his mother, he carries within him a fire that will ignite all of their lives.
A novel of epic magniture, Aphelion, is a gripping and glorious celebration of life and love, both humorous and deeply moving, by the author of the award-winning Father Lands.
MORE REVIEWS:
Read the Melbourne Age’s review of Aphelion in full here.
”[Ballou's] prose is startlingly beautiful…original, fresh and powerful…Though Aphelion is long in pages, it reads quickly, propelled by its deeply satisfying plot and exquisite language. Ballou has created a much more complex novel in Aphelion than in Father Lands, but it’s no more difficult to read as a result. The complexity of time, place and multiple view points is dealt with sensitively and with a sophistication that is always tempered by Ballou’s great love of character and language, and an undercurrent of enduring humour that’s never far beneath the surface.” –Maggie Ball
‘Aphelion is a highly evocative story of loves, lives—and towns—lost.’ –Vogue
‘a beguiling yarn of…mothers and daughters, lovers, and kinship…Aphelion beautifully and humorously encapsulates the loneliness of things too difficult to speak about, and those telltale tears that spring up as soon as you try.’ – Louise Swinn, Sleepers Publishing
‘A novel of memory, loss and longing, the quest for love, the search for home.’ -The Sydney Morning Herald
‘A vast, lyrical tale spanning four generations’ – Gleebook Magazine