We All Lived in Bondi Then

From the author of the multi-award-winning bestseller Between a Wolf and a Dog, a powerful collection of previously unpublished stories.

A sister is haunted by the consequences of a simple mistake. A daughter searches for certainty as her mother's memory degrades. An encounter at a house party changes the course of a life.

In We All Lived in Bondi Then, beloved Australian author Georgia Blain returns to her resonant themes of relationships and family, illness and health, love and death. Composed in Blain's final years, these nine stories grapple with large questions on a human scale, brimming with her trademark acuity, nuance, and warmth.

'We All Lived in Bondi Then is a vibrant and adroit collection of distinctive, faceted stories ... As Blain limns the interior lives of her characters, so the collection glows against the darkness of its author's early death.'
-Felicity Plunkett, The Saturday Paper

'With the gift of these nine moving and shapely stories comes the bonus of an elegant and elegiac foreword by Charlotte Wood, who knew the author well ... Each story is an intricate masterpiece of suspense, rendered in clean and graceful prose. Each is agonising, haunting, harrowing, the characters grounded in sharp reality ... The collection is concerned with facing reality, with looking death in the eye. As grim as this sounds, the stories are composed with a lyrical honesty and an unforgettable strength ... This is a powerful and vivid tapestry of life and love and the brutal quirks of human destiny.'
-Carmel Bird, The Sydney Morning Herald

' Blain returns to some of her favourite, and most resonant, themes- family and relationships, love and death, health and illness ... Although the book is suffused with loss and grief, there are flashes of wry humour and hard-won insight.'
-Nicole Abadee, The Sydney Morning Herald