I've finished The Lockdown Tales: Emergence, which is the second and final volume of my pandemic Decameron. Unlike Boccaccio, it has a hundred and one tales, not a hundred, because…
Alan WhelanSeptember 28, 2021
The Lockdown Tales
Disobedience, Love, Patience and other Stories
“A witty, crisp, and lively imagination let loose: the defiant challenge to a lockdown … The best book of stories I’ve read since Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women, and before that probably David Malouf’s The Complete Stories.”
– Adrian Colman, Professor Emeritus of English, University of Tasmania
Seven women and three men leave the city to avoid a pandemic. They isolate together in a local farm, where they pass the time working, flirting, eating, drinking, making music and above all telling stories. It happened in Florence in 1351, during the Plague, and gave us Boccaccio’s Decameron.
Seven hundred years later, in Australia, it happens again. The stories are very different, but they’re still bawdy, satirical, funny and sometimes sad, and they celebrate human cleverness, love, courage and imagination.
Harris in Underland
Frank Harris, adventurer, literary man and liar, tells his son why Oscar Wilde never escaped to France before his arrest, and how the inmates of a London child sex brothel were rescued. And of the conception of his son.
Many of Victorian London’s literary lions appear, including Oscar, Charles “Lewis Carroll” Dodgson, Ellen Terry, the young Aleister Crowley, with Zhou Ch’en, widow of a great Chinese General. London’s underworld is dangerous and cruel.
Blood and Bone
Kai Kawiti, actor, political activist and womaniser, dies. Two tribes fight over his body and legacy, and many people are pulled into that struggle, changing their lives and their minds.
Falling Angels is a story of death, ruthless tribal politics, oratory, police corruption, robbery on a train, the obligations of friends and lovers, and the building of families. And betrayal, sex and love.
