Friday Favourites :: 20 May

Painting class is back! If you’ve been around a while you might remember that I started going to a watercolour class about a year ago. Our second term was cut short by a covid lockdown, and last week classes finally started again. I find it so helpful to have that time set aside where I actually leave the house specifically to paint, otherwise I am not great at making time to practice.

Lately I’ve been finding myself super inspired by book covers, like this one for Eleanor Limprecht’s new historical fiction novel, The Coast, which was a perfect reference image for our class on clouds this week.

Big thanks to Allen & Unwin for sending an early copy of this one my way! It sounds super interesting – I’ll pop the synopsis below – and I feel like it has been a while since I read any historical fiction so I’m really looking forward to getting into this one!

xo Bron

Synopsis of The Coast by Eleanor Limprecht

Alice is only nine years old in 1910 when she is sent to the feared Coast Hospital lazaret at Little Bay in Sydney, a veritable prison where more patients are admitted than will ever leave. She is told that she’s visiting her mother, who disappeared one day when Alice was two. Once there, Alice learns her mother is suffering from leprosy and that she has the same disease.

As she grows up, the secluded refuge of the lazaret becomes Alice’s entire world, her mother and the other patients and medical staff her only human contact. The patients have access to a private sandstone-edged beach, their own rowboat, a piano and a library of books, but Alice is tired of the smallness of her life and is thrilled by the thought of the outside world. It is only when Guy, a Yuwaalaraay man wounded in World War I, arrives at The Coast, that Alice begins to experience what she has yearned for, as they become friends and then something deeper.