LoveReading Says
If you love zeitgeisty novels about writers, you’ll be blown away by Sophie Cunningham’s This Devastating Fever. Following a 21st-century writer’s experience of researching and writing about Leonard Woolf, it’s an unexpected page-turner about making sense of the precarious present through delving into the past. Darkly comic and compelling, it exudes a level of invention Virginia Woolf would surely have applauded.
During a 2020 lockdown, Australian writer Alice returns to her unfinished, unfocused idea about Leonard Woolf. Through research conducted from 2004, and episodes relating Leonard’s life in the early twentieth-century, we journey to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), where he worked as a colonial administrator, and where Alice converses with Imaginary Leonard over afternoon G&Ts. Imaginary Leonard frequently appears to Alice, declaring, “I have become quite invested in this project of yours”.
Later, Ghost Virginia appears to her, and Vita Sackville-West, who manifests herself, “breeches around her ankles…doing something to make the naked young woman doubled over before her breathe heavily”. Then there’s the Spanish flu epidemic, the rise of fascism, WWII, and Virginia’s suicide. Through this, as bush fires engulf Melbourne, as COVID-19 rages, Alice is also haunted by seeing a loved one fall prey to dementia and Parkinson's.
Wryly hilarious on writers’ proclivity to procrastinate and tumble into research rabbit holes, fascinating on Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and thought-provoking on the role fiction plays in our lives, it really is remarkable how This Devastating Fever manages to do so much, so brilliantly, while also having the pulling power of a page-turner. In addition, this marvel of meta-fiction draws pertinent parallels between the 20th and 21st-centuries, revealing the pervasiveness of environmental disasters, plagues and war. Quite simply, it’s a triumph.
Joanne Owen
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This Devastating Fever Synopsis
SHORTLISTED FOR THE VICTORIAN PREMIER'S AWARD FOR FICTION 2023 ';This is a great novel of enduring significance and enormous beauty.' Sydney Morning HeraldSometimes you need to delve into the past, to make sense of the present Alice had not expected to spend most of the twenty-first century writing about Leonard Woolf. When she stood on Morell Bridge watching fireworks explode from the rooftops of Melbourne at the start of a new millennium, she had only two thoughts. One was: the fireworks are better in Sydney. The other was: is Y2K going to be a thing? Y2K was not a thing. But there were worse disasters to come. Environmental collapse. The return of fascism. Wars. A sexual reckoning. A plague. Uncertain of what to do she picks up an unfinished project and finds herself trapped with the ghosts of writers past. What began as a novel about a member of the Bloomsbury Set, colonial administrator, publisher and husband of one the most famous English writers of the last hundred years becomes something else altogether. Complex, heartfelt, darkly funny and deeply moving, this is Sophie Cunningham's most important book to date a dazzlingly original novel about what it's like to live through a time that feels like the end of days, and how we can find comfort and answers in the past.PRAISE FOR THIS DEVASTATING FEVER ';a very moving novel, laced with wit, pathos, and ferocious truths' The Australian ';Extinction, climate change, the pandemic, love and loss are all there in this vital, virtuoso candle in a jar for eternity.' Australian Women's Weekly ';This Devastating Feveris both timely and timeless, a sophisticated work of fiction that addresses the anxieties of the present moment as well as the most profound questions of history, art, love and loss.A magnificent novel.' EmilyBitto author ofThe StraysandWild Abandon ';It takes a phenomenal control of craft, and a keenly honed intelligence, to do what Cunningham has done with this novel: to interrogate politics and art and culture, to take on love and sex and suffering and loyalty, while all the while ensuring that the reader remains buoyant and captivated by narratives that leap across space and time I loved this book. Iabsolutelyloved it.' Christos Tsiolkas, author ofThe Slapand 71/2 ';Deeply humane, full of humour, and delightfully gossipy about the sex lives of the Bloomsbury Group,This Devastating Feveris innovative in format, chatty in tone and will seduce readers with its simple, direct voice.' Books+Publishing ';Angry and enthralling, this novel challenges the reader's understanding of what a novel might be.' The Saturday Paper ';bold, cheeky, playfully energetic and utterly distinctive' Guardian ';This Devastating Fever is thrillingly audacious fiction. Sophie Cunningham's entwined subjects are profound Leonard Woolf and colonialism, the crises of the present day, the challenges of creative work and she writes commandingly and inventively about them all. The result is an extraordinary novel.'Michelle de Kretser, author ofQuestions of TravelandScary Monsters ';a masterfully told story of intertwined literary lives, old and new' The Canberra Times ';[Cunningham's] prose crackles and spits with a quintessentially Australian wryness, and soars when depicting the natural world in all of the novel's vibrantly drawn locales (Australia, England and Sri Lanka)' South China Morning Post';This Devastating Fever left me with a sense of wonder at how nature, art, love and learning from the past can sustain us. Truly wonderful reading that brings Leonard Woolf alive.' Good Reading ';a deft, original novel that is clearly going to prompt many conversations' The Booklist
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