Amy Witting

Isobel On The Way To The Corner Shop by Amy Witting tells the compelling story of Isobel Callaghan, a writer struggling to build her career in Sydney. Isobel finds herself isolated, impoverished, and hungry, plagued by the fear that she is losing her mind. During a breakdown on her way to the corner shop, Isobel ends up in the hospital....

Amy Witting was a master of the short story, the genre in which she felt 'most at home'. Her subjects—childhood and school, marriage and loneliness, the cruelty of men and women—are rendered in a crisp, understated style, at once compassionate and unsentimental. This new selection of twenty pieces from across five decades includes the acclaimed novella-length 'The Survivors' and the...

In The Visit—Amy Witting's debut novel, first published when she was almost sixty—a group of Bangoree residents gather to read plays by Beckett and Brecht. But their literary pursuits, and their lives, take an unexpected turn after it is revealed that the late Roderick Fitzallan set some of his celebrated love poems in their small country town. Who is the...

Born into a world without welcome, Isobel observes it as warily as an alien beamed onto another planet. She amasses a collection of imaginary friends including the Virgin Mary and Sherlock Holmes, Byron, W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot. However, she is not quite as comfortable with the flesh-and-blood people she meets, and least of all with herself, as she attempts...

When her husband of three decades announces he has a younger lover and wants a divorce, Ella Ferguson realises how protected her life has been: she has 'seen no evil, heard no evil and spoken no evil'. Alone and enraged, she must come to terms with her failed marriage and her relationships with her adult children. A Change in the...