THE MUSEUM OF WORDS
GEORGIA BLAIN
This is the Sydney author’s last book before she died last December from a brain tumour. It is a book of family and friends, of mortality and language, of her impending death. Woven through is the theme of Blain’s love of words, a passion that pulsed in the veins of four women: Blain; her mother, the novelist Anne Deveson, in decline from Alzheimer’s; Blain’s close friend Rosie Scott, who would die shortly after her, also from a brain tumour; Blain’s daughter Odessa. Is this a sad book? Yes. But it is also stirring and uplifting, and Blain writes with a clear, spare beauty that exalts in a harsh landscape that is never allowed to become bleak.