![]() A word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening or never. I must go, uncertain of my fate but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. The stories in the book were well written, funny, and poignant. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in F. I felt like a part of the family as I read Friendly Persuasion. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Persuasion narrates the emotional journey of its protagonist Anne Elliot, who chances upon Captain Wentworth, a suitor she was persuaded to reject seven. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. ![]() Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. ![]() Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. It’s considered her most mature, serious novel though hardly without her signature. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. Persuasion is Jane Austen’s final completed novel, published six months after the author died in 1817. ![]() I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. ![]()
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![]() ![]() My bestselling book here in Australia is Taronga (Penguin). ![]() (I’d still like to write a concluding story for my Gibblewort series, for instance.) There are also many books I contributed stories to. ![]() These last really tested me but were great fun. More than a dozen adult novels, over 20 YA novels, two novellas, a few picture books, and 15 books for littlies. Which was the best-selling for you? How many book awards did you pick up? How many books have you published during your writing career? Now, settled (kind of!) in Battery Point in old Hobart, my wife and I work on. Inevitably, other books must follow, because I suddenly find myself beset by a wealth of things I simply MUST write about. My upcoming novel, Wanderer, (Eagle Books) is the very first fruit of this shift. Then, early in my eighties, I was hit by a yearning to write fiction again. ![]() ![]() I remember trying to wrap my head around this idea as a child and feeling dizzy: Our lives take place in the space that decomposition leaves behind. If nothing decomposed, the earth would pile up kilometers-deep with the bodies of animals and plants. And without their powers of decomposition, our lives would be inconceivable. Fungi can digest many things, from wood to rock to kerosene. But how? My questioning often led me back to fungi-metabolic wizards with a breathtaking capacity to arrange and rearrange the world. A solid log becomes soil, sugar becomes alcohol, a lump of dough rises into bread. I’ve always been fascinated by the way things transform. He recently answered questions about the nature of intelligence, psychedelic drugs, and creative home brews from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. ![]() Sheldrake’s book is a poetic letter to the associates we never knew we had. And they serve as a platform for, and partner in, almost every aspect of life. Fungal species count in the millions-the true number is unknown. ![]() In his book Entangled Life, scientist Merlin Sheldrake introduces us to vastly underappreciated players in the story of our planet. ![]() |