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When the Night Comes by Favel Parrett

by
September 2014, no. 364

When the Night Comes by Favel Parrett

Hachette, $27.99 pb, 265 pp

When the Night Comes by Favel Parrett

by
September 2014, no. 364

Favel Parrett’s second novel, When the Night Comes, opens with its teenage protagonist Isla lying awake in her bunk on a night ferry to Tasmania in the mid-1980s, ‘waiting for the rough seas’. Her younger brother sleeps beside her, and her distracted, emotionally distant mother – the kind of woman who is ‘always sitting places by herself in the night’ – is smoking on deck. Together, the three are weathering the roiling overnight passage in order to escape a violent past and make a new life in Hobart. The rough seas the novel goes on to navigate are, as one might expect, both literal and metaphorical.

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