“Still here, Bessie?” A tissue of sound.
Will it be bloodiness he wants? An act of contrition?
“About Marta,” he whispers. “Forgive me.”
Elizabeth smiles. She kisses him on the lips. “It cleared the air,” she says. “It was a good thing to do.”
He marshals his strength to say something further. “I swear,” he whispers — though the words are thinner than air, they brush Elizabeth s ears like the shadow of an echo — “I swear it never came to anything.”
She smiles her incomprehension and he touches her hair. She thinks: it is all behind us then. She leans toward him, rests her cheek beside his, and murmurs: “I love you, Edward.”
Soon, she knows, he will begin to complain testily of the bedding and the nurses. By tomorrow the hearing aid and the pacemaker will assault his sensibilities unendurably. But for this moment he smiles and touches her face.
Elizabeth is moved to tears. It has sung itself well, she thinks. She likes this ending.
OTHER FICTION BY
JANETTE TURNER HOSPITAL
NORTH OF NOWHERE SOUTH OF LOSS
“I live at the desiccating edge of things, on the dividing line between two countries, nowhere, everywhere, in the margins.”
Janette Turner Hospital’s stories have won widespread international acclaim for their dazzling style, intellectual depth and crackling energy. Her characters oscillate between estrangement and a sense of belonging, as Hospital herself has suffered geographical displacement from the Deep North of Australia to the Deep South of the United States.
Seven of these fourteen stories were included in the “North of Nowhere” section of Collected Stories (UQP 1995). Seven, including “South of Loss”, are published here in book form for the first time.
“Her stories are like brief cyclones wrapped around an unexpected center of calm.”
Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Sensuous, speculative fictions about the experience of dislocation … her stories develop like poems or meditations.”
New York Times Book Review
ISBN: 0 7022 3333 1
CHARADES
This vibrant, superbly crafted novel explores the elusive boundaries between existence and imagination, memory and truth. From the subtropical lushness of Queensland’s Tamborine rainforest to the claustrophobic bedroom of a Boston physicist, Hospital’s characters breathe an atmosphere of passion and suspense. Charade Ryan, an enigmatic story-spinning Scheherazade, searches for a way to unravel the long-held secrets of her family origins.
“A journey of strange and beautiful complexity through some of the finest prose being written anywhere today.”
Toronto Star
“Janette Turner Hospital goes from strength to literary strength — ever brilliant in ideas, graceful in expression, resourceful in story — and in Charades throwing in, for good measure, a heady eroticism. I loved it!”
Fay Weldon
ISBN: 0 7022 3388 9
THE LAST MAGICIAN
This superb novel is richly textured and intellectually challenging, a tour de force from our most elegantly seductive writer.
The last magician is Charlie, the photographer, who monitors and records everything as he seeks the silent Cat through physical and emotional infernos. Charlie, Cat, Robbie and Catherine shared a childhood summer in a Queensland rainforest. But a death intruded on their charmed circle, binding them to complicity and silence.
Decades later, festering memories seep through into the present, in the same way as the desperate underside of a corrupt Sydney breaks through into tidy lives and well-kept secrets.
“Spellbinding reading, an adventure of the mind and heart that enthralls from first page to last … Haunting, disturbing, subversive.”
Newsday, New York
“The real magic at work here is the writer’s … an ambitious, intense and satisfying book.”
New York Times Book Review
ISBN: 0 7022 3401 X
BORDERLINE
A meat truck is intercepted at the Canadian-American border, and a group of illegal immigrants is removed. Felicity watches from her car, and talks with Gus who is also waiting in the queue. When they realise a woman has been left behind, they impulsively smuggle her across the border. La Magdalena will change their lives irrevocably.
In this, her third novel, Janette Turner Hospital transforms a thrilling and suspenseful story into a deadly resonant parable for our times, leaving her readers not just entertained, but enriched.
“Janette Turner Hospital is a stunningly stylish writer who turns almost every chapter into a virtuoso performance … this is a very clever, very fascinating book which should not be missed.”
Brenda Little, Australian
“This book is brilliant in its several meanings: sparkling, intelligent, distinguished … Hospital is in complete and wondrous control of her material.”
Shirley Streshinsky, San Francisco Chronicle
ISBN: 0 7022 3400 1
THE IVORY SWING
Juliet yearns for the “ebb and flow of life lived avidly”, for the pace and challenge of city living. The conflict between her love of husband and children and her own passionate need for expression is intensified by her move from small town Canada to Southern India.
The stifling restrictions on Juliet’s freedom are magnified in the plight of her young widowed neighbour. The beautiful Yashoda longs to embrace the Western values that would release her from the strictures of Indian tradition. But the ancient mores are powerful and enduring, and challenging them inevitably leads to tragedy.
“The steamy, subtle, utterly impenetrable mysteries of India … a work both emotionally and stylistically deft.”
Thomas Keneally
“A truly magnificent literary achievement.”
Booklist, USA
ISBN: 0 7022 3403 6
First published 1983
Published 1990 by University of Queensland Press
Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
Reprinted 1992, 1998.
This edition 2003
www.uqp.uq.edu.au
© Janette Turner Hospital
This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
Typeset by University of Queensland Press
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
The epigram “Lines for an Old Man” and the lines from “Gerontion” are reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd from Collected Poems 1909-1962, by T. S. Eliot.
Sponsored by the Queensland Office of Arts and Cultural Development.
Cataloguing in Publication Data
National Library of Australia
Hospital, Janette Turner, 1942– .
The tiger in the tiger pit.
I. Title.
A823.3
ISBN: 9780702256097 (ePub)
The Tiger in the Tiger Pit Page 25
