The First Week by Margaret Merrilees

JUDGES' COMMENTS

To give birth to a child, to love and nurture a young life to adulthood, then see it crash to earth – for its own flaws and mistakes but perhaps also for your own – are profound, dismaying truths for the character of Marian Anditon in The First Week. Shattered by her son’s actions, Marian must travel from her farm to the city to face him and what he has done, fighting her way from numbing incomprehension through paralysis to a new apprehension of her own life and the lives of those around her.

This novel is a pitch-perfect account of family and its bonds, both weak and strong, against the tough landscape of the Stirling Ranges of Western Australia. A work of no great length, it nevertheless carries big themes in confident and unobtrusive prose. It movingly asks us to consider, in dealing with the acts and failings of our own children, what part justice, what part love? Moreover, what rights may white Australians assign to themselves in a country where justice, love, and rights have been denied to the people who live among us, but whose land is no longer theirs?