Roslyn McFarland
writer

Foreign Attachments

In this beautifully constructed Russian doll of a novel, two Australian women leave their homeland in search of a room of their own in which to forge their art. Stella Bowen studies painting in London where she meets, among other literati, wild Ezra Pound and the bearlike, charming Ford Madox Ford with whom she lives in the countryside, has a child and enters the glittering life of Paris in the 1920s, where she struggles to survive and paint and where the likes of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas and Jean Rhys dance in and out of her life.

A century later, Neve leaves Australia for life in Paris with the suave Antoine to write her novel on Bowen’s life. Each woman is captured by love and confronted with betrayal and obstacles in the pursuit of her art.

By skilfully building a novel within a novel, Roslyn McFarland’s Foreign Attachments delivers a deeply entertaining and life-filled portrait of the lives of creative women in a novel as richly rendered as one of Bowen’s exquisite paintings.

— Jo Gardiner

Read a review of Foreign Attachments on the Compulsive Reader website

All the Lives We've Lived

Living alone in the Blue Mountains, baby-boomer Kate Ward is estranged from her adult son. Where did it all go wrong?

She decides to return to Salt Pan Creek, the place of her childhood in post-war Sydney suburbia. It’s here that she must come to terms with a history that’s far greater than her own personal past.

While ALL THE LIVES WE'VE LIVED takes us back to relive the fifties, sixties and seventies, it’s Kate’s willingness to confront the truth of her teenage relationship with Gary, an indigenous boy, that reflects Australia’s need to face its collective colonial past.

Blending fictional and historical characters and events, this deeply moving novel of interconnected stories is ultimately about storytelling itself: about our need to tell them; about the ones we remember; the ones we value; and the ones we distort because the truth may be too hard to bear.

‘This is an exceptional novel — a work of the imagination edged with compelling reality. The lives go on in the rhythms of the prose and vibrate in the memory. The story is a brave one and this is a book I will come back to again.’ — Robert Adamson, poet, publisher and inaugural CAL Chair of Poetry at University of Technology, Sydney

‘Each story is a jewel set perfectly into the whole where the interior worlds of the characters are rendered in engaging and powerful detail.’ — Jo Gardiner author of The Concerto Inn

Read a review of All The Lives We've Lived on the Compulsive Reader website

The Privacy of Art

This novella concerns a Bloomsbury-like group of artists, who live in Australia’s Blue Mountains area from the 1960s to the present day.

Neil Baxter and Isabella Shaw share a successful artistic partnership – but to whose cost? Their unorthodox relationship, built upon mutual admiration, strong bohemian values and libertarian principles, has some painful ramifications when Persia, their daughter, marries her father’s ex-lover.

But more than this, Neil and Isabella’s story is the backdrop for the emotional heart of this book, which is the evolving relationship between Isabella’s son, Hugo and his childhood friend, Meg Taylor.

Told through a series of interwoven narratives, where the past is always bubbling to the surface, THE PRIVACY OF ART explores the ideas of artistic and emotional experimentation involving: love and desire; truth, deception and collusion; ambition and artistic jealousy.