Love Letter to Lola by Bird, Carmel 2024 NEUF

You clamber up, heading for the exit, the circle of faint light, as the radiance of the pre-dawn leads you on toward freedom. I follow. You spread your darling wings. You enter the net that awaits you.

Bold, tender, and often fantastical, Love Letter to Lola enters the very pain of loss and grief while preserving a wise, sly, humorous, and ironic point of view. The thylacine, the dodo, the passenger pigeon, the blue macaw are all candidates to return from extinction, and here each is given its own moving narrative. The meaning of the British monarchy is challenged by a green spider; a unicorn and the rainbow serpent contemplate the end of the world; an angel gives his perspective on human life and love with a thoughtful and exquisite mischief. The authors own Reflection on the inspiration and the construction of the stories is a swift and penetrating conversation on how writing happens.

Playing with darkness but in no way mucking around, this teeming collection is deeply tuned to the possibilities of a future where all life on the planet is treasured and nurtured by humans. - Gregory Day

A beguiling blend of historical facts - with an eye for the unexpected and bizarre - and a dazzling imagination. A vividly realised world of fantasy, romance, and horror, in which cockroaches, rats, and dodos voice the brutal realities of species extinction and the destructive effects of colonialism. Theres profound emotion and disarming wit, with faint echoes of optimism about the future of the planet under siege. Vintage Carmel Bird: immersive, surprising, and irresistible. - Susan Midalia

Carmel Bird is an extraordinary writer, and these stories are playful, violent, wild. In Love Letter to Lola, she asks us to inhabit the bodies and minds of birds and insects, mammals and angels as they - as we all - stand tremulous on the point of extinction. Reading them made me feel braver. - Sophie Cunningham

These stories are in love with life and its surprising possibilities. They are clever, heartfelt, joyous, and wise. They find, as Hopkins said, the dearest freshness deep down things. Time spent with Carmel Bird is simply uplifting. - Michael McGirr

Once again Carmel Bird weaves her magic, constantly surprising the reader with her inventiveness and her wisdom. Reading her stories is like opening up a compendium in which one finds unexpected treasures. Hers is a unique voice, attuned to the disquiets of our age and still able to inspire hope and reflection. - Dennis Altman

With Love Letter to Lola, Carmel Bird can rightfully take her place as one of the finest short story writers in Australian literary history. On the back of an already stunning body of work, this collection - rich, unnerving, playful, terrifying, and heartbreakingly moving - pushes the limits of the genre to such a satisfying and effortless degree that you feel you are reading something entirely fresh and new. Birds stories teem with life, they eddy and dance, and flow back and forth through each other, like memories and history and life. They may be told from the perspective of a cockroach, or a mournful brother, or an angel, and each and every one of these stories is thrillingly convincing. As a writer, Bird has been and continues to be impossible to categorise. Her ideas and obsessions and interests are multitude, but all without exception are driven by her utterly unique, pyrotechnic energy. Her stories roar and soar, they set your teeth on edge and trigger tears, they make you howl with laughter even as you peer into the abyss of existence. This is the thing about masters of their craft - they reignite in you the unquantifiable joy of reading. And if theyre good enough, they also make you excited about the complex art of writing. How on earth, you ask, did she just do that? Carmel Bird is one such master. - Matthew Condon