Stead’s Sydney is a dissolute, libidinal city, and a companionable backdrop to her heroine’s own coming of age. Set in the 1930s, its protagonist is Teresa Hawkins, an intelligent and idealistic nineteen-year-old who, when she is not working in a Redfern factory saving for her own voyage out, enjoys ‘voluptuous’ swimming in Sydney’s bays. Given she has just completed an honours seminar studying neglected Australian books, it’s no stretch to imagine one of the novels she reads that summer is Christina Stead’s novel For Love Alone (1944). But first she heads to Glebe to buy the first of the novels she will read on the rocks at Gordons Bay over the ‘last hot summer’ of her final months adrift in Sydney. Living off the dwindling remains of her student allowance, she plans to get a job, start saving for an airplane ticket overseas. The unnamed narrator of Madeleine Watts’ debut novel The Inland Sea (2020) is a recent literature graduate and aspiring writer.
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