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The beauty of the ordinary

Stories of loss and devastation
by
April 2021, no. 430

Smokehouse by Melissa Manning

University of Queensland Press, $29.99 pb, 264 pp

The beauty of the ordinary

Stories of loss and devastation
by
April 2021, no. 430

Smokehouse is an engagingly constructed collection of interlinked stories set in small-town, yet globally connected, settler Tasmania. The volume, which is focused on personal crises and family breakdown, is bookended by the two parts of the novella that lends the collection its name. This splicing is an inspired decision: the end of Part One keeps us turning the pages through the subsequent, fully realised short stories; with Part Two we feel rewarded whenever we spot a character first encountered in a story that seemed discrete.

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