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When the Night Comes by Favel Parrett: book review

 


When the Night Comes by Favel Parrett (2014) is set in Tasmania, an island state of Australia, in the capital city Hobart, in the 1980s.

Isla and her brother were going to a new place with their mother – an island in the middle of the sea: Tasmania. Leaving the mainland of Australia was supposed to make their lives better, but their mother’s perpetual sadness pervaded their everyday lives. 

Their mother found a house to rent – a dark, shadowy house in a cold, damp coastal city – a house without an inside toilet; the toilet was an outhouse in the back garden. 

Isla sees a red ship and her eyes light up. She didn’t expect a sailor from the ship to befriend her mother, but she is glad he did. She loves the stories of his Danish home, his life on the seas, and his expeditions to Antarctica. It sounded so adventurous and exotic and, well, so different from her own mundane, sad, lonely existence in a country at the bottom of the world. ‘All the things he told me, I wanted more than anything.’

‘It was something special to go on Bo Anker Johansen’s ship, the Nella Dan.’ On the ship, she was in another world. 

Then their mother bought a house with her divorce settlement, and they moved in, wtih a new cat called Molly. Surely, life will get better now, thinks Isla. But Bo, the sailor, left on another voyage to Antarctica. His ship was stuck in ice for seven weeks. Soon afer his return, he set sail again. That was his life; his life on the seas. Isla ponders, ‘Why would he ever want to come back here?’ 

This is a hauntingly, poetic, evocative fictional tale – except for the true red ship, the Nella Dan. Dan for Danish. It is about kindness, and the friendship between a young girl and a modern-day Danish Viking. It is not only about loneliness and togetherness, but also of remote and lonely days, locations, and landscapes. Above, all, it is a beautiful and gentle story. 









 

 

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS  is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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