Gretchen Shirm

Gretchen Shirm is the author of Having Cried Wolf and Where the Light Falls. Her third book The Crying Room will be published in 2023. She lives in Sydney.

Works By Gretchen Shirm

Loops and Layers
Time is fluid in Stephanie Bishop’s new novel Man Out of Time, an intimate portrait of a family breaking down. The narration is split between the points of view of Stella, her mother Frances, and her father Leon. Bishop captures the fluctuations o...
26 Nov. 2018
Legal Fiction: The Woman on the Stairs by Bernhard Schlink
The key distinction between The Woman on the Stairs and Schlink’s earlier fiction is that the past acted on those characters in ways that were hidden to them, but drawn out through the narrative. Here, an unspoken past acts on the protagonist and
26 Apr. 2017
The complicity of silence: Kinder Than Solitude by Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li’s Kinder Than Solitude begins in a funeral parlour in contemporary Beijing with the unceremonious cremation of Shaoai, a woman who suffered serious brain damage 21 years earlier, but had ‘clung to a world that had neither use or a place f...
3 June. 2014
As if the sea curved up: The Railwayman’s Wife by Ashley Hay
One of the strange contradictions of fiction is that immense beauty can often be found in writing about grief and loss. The things we often choose to look away from or avoid in everyday life can, in the hands of a novelist like Ashley Hay, become
14 May. 2013