The Labyrinth: Winner of the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award

Erica Marsden’s son, an artist, has been imprisoned for homicidal negligence. In a state of grief, Erica cuts off all ties to family and friends, and retreats to a quiet hamlet on the south-east coast near the prison where he is serving his sentence.

There, in a rundown shack, she obsesses over creating a labyrinth by the ocean. To build it—to find a way out of her quandary—Erica will need the help of strangers. And that will require her to trust, and to reckon with her past.

The Labyrinth is a hypnotic story of guilt and denial, of the fraught relationship between parents and children, that is also a meditation on how art can both be ruthlessly destructive and restore sanity. This multi-award-winning bestseller shows Amanda Lohrey to be at the peak of her powers.

“'The story of Richard Kline is marked by a...luminous wit, along with the quiet courage of a mind willing to countenance mysteries that our secular age refuses to broach.'”

'Amanda Lohrey has always been a writer of uncompromising artistic purpose who is never content for the novel to be mere entertainment. She has an instinctive, if understated, sense of form and an inimitable novelist's voice…The Labyrinth is shadowed and haunted by strangeness. It is a novel in high realist mode that also has romance elements, if only in the way it encompasses a tragicomic mood and a certain formal audacity that brings to mind the moodiness and restless shifts of late Shakespeare. The Labyrinth has a gravity that outstares everything that may seem grey or gaunt in a literary endeavour where autumn seems to sink to midwinter. It is a work of considerable literary artistry.’ Judges’ comments, Prime Minister’s Literary Awards 2021 (shortlisted)
‘Amanda Lohrey is an author of exquisite subtlety and wry humour. Her ability to draw out the quieter nuances of the human condition is evidenced again in A Short History of Richard Kline, in which she has crafted a male character of great depth.’ Mercury
'Amanda Lohrey might be described as a writer’s writer: proficient in short and long form fiction and a veteran of the essay. Her writing is the literature of ideas. Her new novel, The Labyrinth, uses the idea of the labyrinth as its key organising principle, containing echoes and repetitions throughout to weave together a haunting narrative about loss and self-understanding…Lohrey’s descriptions are elegant and transfixing…There is something dreamlike about the novel.’ Australian
‘Extraordinarily vivid and compelling...a stunning and memorable novella’ Age on 'Vertigo'
‘Hypnotic and beautiful, The Labyrinth forces us to reckon with how our deepest bonds can inflict the most pain. Amid this coil of darkness, however, is the novel’s unfailing light: that hope and redemption are always found in art and creation.’ Rebecca Starford
‘ The Labyrinth is Amanda Lohrey’s wisest and most intimate novel yet—luminous, full of sharp-edged beauty and illuminating questions about how we should live our lives. It asks, most simply, how to keep going in the wake of a disaster that has no neat ending. This is a novel in which nothing is out of place—every word and image resonates.’ Julieanne Lamond
‘Lohrey’s writing is excellent, and she mixes pastoral and gothic tropes beautifully.’ Books+Publishing
‘A beautiful, brutal book that I experienced as both earthy and unearthly. I loved it.’ Laura McPhee-Browne
‘Not a book to be analysed but a book to experience. It is compelling, visceral and deeply moving…It is delicate yet strong. Painful yet regenerative.’ Fiona Place
‘Iridescent...The Labyrinth is a nuanced and engrossing novel of bread and bones broken, the trace and rack of violence, and threads that lead the way out of exile.' Saturday Paper
‘Lohrey’s writing ensures we invest in and understand a mother’s intense need for forgiveness…I do believe that this novel is her very best. It is perfectly balanced and completely masterful. Fans of Alice Munro and Anne Tyler will rejoice in this kind of Australian story.’ Readings
‘An unsteadying read of strength, love and brutality that is provocatively inconclusive in its closing. Poetic and enormous.’ Better Read Than Dead
‘Left me with a sense of clean, clear joyfulness and creativity…it’s a book of ideas, but [Lohrey] delivers in terms of offering revelations and some sort of hope through making things’ RN Bookshelf
‘Beautiful…Quite possibly my favourite Lohrey…One can’t help but think of We Need to Talk About Kevin…but this is far more subtle and intimate.’ Jaclyn Crupi
'The Labyrinth is an impressive addition to Lohrey’s body of fiction, which always has philosophical foundations for its warmly human stories. Here the characters and ideas are deftly integrated into a short novel of deep wisdom about nature and art, men and women, motherhood and home...Elegant sentences move with the mindful pace of footsteps on a pathway.' SMH/Age
‘This is a book about being a parent, building or making…as therapy, and the inability to be truly alone in today’s society…The pace of the book reflects the contemplative nature of walking a labyrinth, both the inner one and the physical one that mirrors it.’ Herald Sun
‘A deeply meditative book…[Amanda Lohrey’s] writing here is beautifully layered, rich in imagery and meaning, without ever being laboured...The Labyrinth offers a pull towards the unknown and a comfort in solitude. It is a sharply tuned novel, a sprawling narrative that resists rigid expectations, instead allowing those who inhabit the pages to surrender themselves to the mode of “reversible destiny” that it is constructed around.' Guardian
‘Haunting…A meditation on fundamental patterns in nature and in familial relations…[with a] narrative so bracing—like salt spray stinging your face—that one is borne forward inexorably…Taut, deftly edited…The novel’s story is stark, unflinching—gothic without contrivance…Summary does scant justice to the subtlety and power of Lohrey’s writing…Every page of this densely populated novel, with its incised landscape, shimmers.’ Australian Book Review
‘Amanda’s prose is low-key, unsentimental, economical. The tale unfolds without fanfare but with deft strokes that have the power of leaving some things unsaid…excellent reading for the days when you are shut at home with not enough to do.’ Warragul and Drouin Gazette
‘This quietly cerebral, emotional and atmospheric story is a gift of hope at a time when so many are struggling with seemingly insurmountable challenges.’ Good Reading
‘[Lohrey’s] storytelling is masterful: honed to pleasing plainness and assured in its measured tempo, her novels would take multiple readings to unpick her craft, which is deft to the point of invisibility at times.’ Mercury
'In this fine, sensory work Amanda Lohrey spirals imagination, ideas and humanity into a refuge.’ Joy Lawn, Paperbark Words
‘Lohrey’s writing is typically supple and luminous, her spare narrative counterpointed with vivid, detailed, often enigmatic dreams. By the end…the reader [is ready] to go back and relish again at leisure this author’s precise and shining prose.’ Advertiser
'The release of a new Amanda Lohrey novel is always a moment to look forward to and The Labyrinth (Text) looks set to be one of her most successful yet – mystical, earthed and beautifully told.’ James Boyce, Age
‘Fluid, dream-like…Lohrey’s novel is beautifully written and compellingly personal.’ Otago Daily Times
'My novel of the year, full stop…A story told without a syllable of excess sentiment or false feeling, yet which sails full square into the mystic.’ Geordie Williamson, Australian
‘A fine novelist…Her expertise, observant eye and ear, and sense of story are fully present.’ Conversation
'Lohrey brings all her skill to this compelling and contemplative novel, which will linger in your mind long after you read the final page.’ Claire Nichols, ABC RN
'Amanda Lohrey has always been a writer of uncompromising artistic purpose who is never content for the novel to be mere entertainment. She has an instinctive, if understated, sense of form and an inimitable novelist's voice. The Labyrinth is the story of a woman with a beloved son all but lost to her in jail. The way in which she seeks a catharsis, and a solace, by creating a labyrinth as a distraction is also an enactment, at once symbolic and literal, of her mood. This is a novel of unusual gravity with a deeply poignant background which is also a quest for some shape and pattern that might give meaning to a life with a diminished horizon. The protagonist's relationship with the eccentric East European stonemason who gives form to her dream is at once exotic and credible. The Labyrinth is shadowed and haunted by strangeness. It is a novel in high realist mode that also has romance elements, if only in the way it encompasses a tragicomic mood and a certain formal audacity that brings to mind the moodiness and restless shifts of late Shakespeare. The Labyrinth has a gravity that outstares everything that may seem grey or gaunt in a literary endeavour where autumn seems to sink to midwinter. It is a work of considerable literary artistry.’ Judges’ comments, 2021 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards
‘Superb: thoughtful, socially astute, and engaged, in a most sophisticated way, with literary form…Takes the gothic and remakes it in a tough and tailor-made form for our time and our place.’ Australian Book Review

Amanda Lohrey lives in Tasmania and writes fiction and non-fiction. She has taught at the University of Tasmania, the University of Technology Sydney and the University of Queensland. Amanda is a regular contributor to the Monthly magazine and a former senior fellow of the Australia Council’s Literature Board. She received the 2012 Patrick White Award. The Labyrinth (2021), her eighth work of fiction, won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, a Prime Minister’s Literary Award, a Tasmanian Literary Award and the Voss Literary Prize.

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