Cold Light

By Frank Moorhouse

# 3 in Edith Trilogy

$17.00

Edith Campbell Berry, who joined the League in Geneva before the war, is out of a job. With her sexually unconventional husband, Ambrose, she comes back to Australia to live in Canberra.

Edith now has ambitions to become Australia’s first female ambassador, but while she waits for a Call from On High, she gets caught up in the planning of the national capital and the dream that it should be ‘a city like no other’.

When her communist brother, Frederick, turns up after many years of absence, she becomes concerned that he may jeopardise her chances of becoming a diplomat. It is not a safe time to be a communist in Australia or to be related to one, but she refuses to be cowed by the anti-communist sentiment sweeping the country.

It is also not a safe time or place to be a wife with a lavender husband’. After pursuing the Bloomsbury life for many years, Edith finds herself fearful of being exposed.

Unexpectedly, in mid-life she also realises that she yearns for children. When she meets a man who could offer not only security but a ready-made family, she consults the Book of Crossroads and the answer changes the course of her life.

Intelligent, poignant and absorbing, Cold Light is a remarkable novel, which can also be read as a companion to the earlier Edith novels Grand Days and Dark Palace.

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