Elizabeth Costello

Elizabeth Costello, an Australian novelist known around the world, is still remembered mostly for one book from early in her career. Now old, she is wanted chiefly to be celebrated, and she spends her days making appearances in conference halls in many countries, where her private mind must be put on show. She gives a lecture on receiving an award at an American college; she lectures on a cruise ship alongside an African poet; she travels to Africa to see her sister, who works there as a missionary and is being given an honorary degree, in what both see as a last chance to be reconciled; and in Amsterdam, addressing a gathering of writers, she finds the man she is talking about sitting in the audience. Through these formal addresses her roles as a mother, a sister, a lover and a writer come into view.

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About the book

Form

Novel

First published

2003

Author's age

63 when first published

ISBN

9781740512657 (Random House Australia, Australia)

9780436206160 (Secker & Warburg, United Kingdom)

9780670031306 (Viking, United States)

9780099461920 (Vintage, United Kingdom)

9780142004814 (Penguin Books, United States)

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