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The Night Guest by Fiona McFarlane

Featured on Simon Mayo Drivetime Monday 6 January 2014

About the Book

Ruth is an elderly Australian widow who lives alone by the sea, maintaining the order of her days with small, carefully observed rituals, aware that she’s becoming forgetful. One night, she thinks she hears a tiger in the house; the next morning, an unknown woman arrives at Ruth’s back door, offering her services as a home-help. It is the beginning of a strange, intense and unequal relationship, whose unpredictable path the reader follows with an ever-deepening sense of foreboding.

About the Author

Fiona McFarlane was born in Sydney. She has a BA in English from Sydney University and a PhD in American Literature from Cambridge University, and holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was a Michener Fellow and won the university's Keene Prize for Literature in 2012. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker, Zoetrope: All-Story, Southerly, The Missouri Review, and Best Australian Stories. She lives in Sydney.

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