Following the death of her mother and both her brothers, Emma consigns herself to a solitary life at sea believing herself cursed.

After years alone, she is mysteriously drawn to land where she is afraid for the life of the man and his daughter who meet her at the jetty.

But who knows where our stories begin and end or how they are intertwined? Who knows whether now, on the island, she begins a new tale or takes a role in a story that began generations ago?

This is such a unique story and so different to anything I’ve read recently. It’s hard to describe as it reads as a series of short stories drifting through generations until the connections become clear.

While I did find it a bit slow at the beginning I’m so happy that I persevered with it because it was such a fascinating read!

Thank you to Text Publishing, NetGalley and the author for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A beautiful read. It’s hard to describe this because really it’s not till the end that it’s all explained. It drifts through times and characters who are all connected by a place. There’s a building on a hill overlooking a forest next to the sea. The building goes through stages, first it’s a prison, then a hospital, next a juvenile detention centre. One prisoner is bequeathed the land beneath the hill and he establishes a village to service the surrounding farms and the town grows and many of the generations of characters are introduced. It’s so well done and very difficult to stop reading as I loved the characters as they go through their lives filled with good times and bad.

_The End and Everything Before It_ (Finegan Kruckemeyer)

This is the kind of novel I will hand-sell to my favourite customers with as little information about the plot as possible, to make sure that readers have the joy of coming to it as raw and impressionable as I did with my pre-release proof: I hope that they may all close the book after finishing it and sit, holding it, as I did, unmoored, heart-quickened, satisfied, waiting for breath to return, then with the involuntary sigh of contentment that can only come from a book as masterfully yet lightly crafted as this one.

Finegan Kruckemeyer’s debut novel is achingly tender, wistful, and delicate, shot through with fine veins of grief and death, and tiny fissures of violence, all adding gravity to the warmest and most sensitive elements. Set across several hundred years, between a hill and a sea, the labyrinthine narrative in _The End and Everything Before It_ seems to barrel haphazardly somehow in all directions at once, spiralling in and out and back and over and under, always moving (though always grounded geographically). But, of course, the novel’s cartography is the supreme opposite of haphazard, and is as tightly mapped as a spider’s web, the connections intricate and vital and yet, to the naked eye, utterly coincidental.

This is a world in which the desperation to protect loved ones and strangers (and selves) drives characters in all sorts of extraordinary directions – to run away from, to run toward, to go to sea forever, to tiptoe onto land after forever, to birth children, to build nests, to stage-manage others’ histories, to birth children, to tell stories, to remain silent, to rewrite stories, to plant forests, to found towns, to save lives. A world where those in power make games of the existence of those without – either for love or for miserly misery – but where those ‘without’ power are rarely truly without. A world where things may seem ordinary but the ordinary is far from ordinary. In this world characters sometimes echo folktale archetypes, but only insofar as those archetypes are x-rays, and these characters warm the bones, pulsing with quintessential, idiosyncratic, beautiful and terrible flesh and veins and tumours and hearts and organs. In the world of this novel, mysteries and secrets are sanctioned and held quiet by community while, conversely, myths and stories grow up like vines tying together families, generations and towns. The world of this novel is built on the very best kind of magic realism: the kind where the real outshines the magic, and the magic out-grounds the real.

Due to the inherently complex texture of the narrative structure, initially it was challenging to orient to the jagged timeframe (although never to location: the sea, forest, and hill at the heart of the story always tie us to the tangible landscape that cups all these lives), each new miniature portrait of a partial-life prompting more questions than it answered. But before long, it was comfortable to settle into the twisting rhythms of the interleaved stories that are less circular than, in the words of Anja (in many ways the central character), ‘an ellipse’; or, as she later notes: ‘I realised how time works – how you can’t explain your rules to time. It is patient, yes, but not swayable’. Be patient with the shifting of time in this novel and its rules, not your own, are what will make sense ultimately. The hints of foreshadowing are always adroit and retrospectively revelatory. Connections and links feel at once inevitable, unexpected and natural, and every moment and image is polished and tempered like tumbled beach-glass, and absolutely necessary to the whole.

At first, I was (perhaps unreasonably) anticipating the elegant, dreamlike turn of phrase that Kruckemeyer, in his writing for the stage, is master of, and I worried that the same heights of poetry might not be reached here. But as soon as the narrative began to fan itself open, it made space to hold this voice, which sits comfortably throughout; baroque ornamentation that coils easily around the concrete, everyday glimpses of characters’ lives, subtle watermarks and hauntings of imagery that lift the prose beyond the ordinary. Sometimes simple sentences are so hypnotic that you never want to wake from them, and you wonder how they can bear to exist at all, while at the same time, the prose is always clean, clear, uncluttered, easy.

There are also layers to the novel – filmy, dreamlike gauzes – of things we can only partially understand and glimpse through the hard light of realism, giving us a tantalising sense that understanding – true knowledge of the universe (the universe of this book, and also the ‘real’ universe beyond it) – is nearly within grasp, until the shivering conclusion when all that we didn’t even realise still remained unspilled is scooped together into a glimmering, glowing rightness that settles all. As the young Anja, with wisdom beyond her years, tells the second woman in her life to become her mother, ‘you can’t really say what a story means until it’s over’: never more true than in this novel, where by the end you will hold both the answer and the question, and the desire to read it all over again to be sure or, perhaps even better, to remain profoundly unsure.

Moments in the book were reminiscent of _Our Town_ (if Thornton Wilder had had a little more peculiar and risky a sense of structure and of world); of _Cloudstreet_ (but with Tim Winton’s sweeping scope elegantly compressed to something much more painterly); _Flames_ (sharing Robbie Arnott’s capacity for nimble sleights of hand with reality – always reminding us that, no matter how fantastical, as one of Kruckemeyer’s characters notes, ‘fiction is at its heart true’). But more than that, _The End and Everything Before It_ is reminiscent most resonantly of only itself, with a voice and heart I can’t wait to read more of, in Kruckemeyer’s next works.

Every now and then a book comes along that reminds me of the sheer joy of reading, and this debut novel by playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer is such a book. It's very nearly perfect, and is bound to stay with me for a long time. Defying all the conventions of traditional storytelling, readers who enjoy literary fiction will love this, and readers who don't - well they just might be converted.

This story reads like a fairy tale or fable, with larger-than-life characters populating a detailed, imaginary landscape. The structure is almost kaleidoscopic, beginning somewhere in the second half, then moving backwards, forwards, and all over, really. It slowly becomes apparent that there are connections to be made everywhere, and just when you think you have it all straight, the end comes along to let you know that there's more to it than you could ever have imagined! Such an apt title.

While this is a relatively short book, people who follow my reviews will know I'm a slow reader, so it took me a few sittings to read through to the end. I really wish I'd been able to finish in a single day, because then I may not have given into my own curiosity/frustration and drawn a mud-map of how I thought all the characters related to each other. I warn against this because it kind of spoiled the experience for me (even though Kruckemeyer had more surprises in store!). Instead I would urge readers to just trust the author.

With no real anchors to time or place, I must say this book gave me strong vibes of Robbie Arnott's superb novel, The Rain Heron. It's just about the highest praise I can give.

Highly recommended.

‘It’s just … you can’t really say what a story means until it’s over.’

Reading this novel is a little like trying to find the beginning and end of a Celtic knot. The knot is beautiful, you can follow the pattern, you can speculate where it begins and ends but you cannot be certain.

Yes, this novel has a start and a conclusion, but the story weaves its way around involving different people, crossing different periods of time and invoking images that may be new or simply reiterations of the past, or a foretelling of the future.

‘But life and death lie either side of a small stream in such moments—happily I stood on the preferred bank.

I am not going to attempt to describe the story: I could list the ingredients, but my words cannot describe the way in which Mr Kruckemeyer draws those ingredients together in such a magical way. Emma, the wanderer, Isaac the orphan who builds a town, Conor, the orphan who works in a book shop, Nella the seer … these are four of my favourite characters. But there are other people to meet, and lessons to learn.

‘One day the childless couple took in a parentless youth from a cruel building that had once been a prison, and then a hospital, later an immigration facility, and then a juvenile home.’

I love this novel and will be purchasing a copy. It’s heartening and uplifting, and a reminder that communities are shaped by both love and loss.

Note: My thanks to NetGalley and Text Publishing for providing me with a free electronic copy of this book for review purposes.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

This is a novel that requires concentration. And contemplation. It is a story about stories, and the art of telling a story, and the impact of being told a story. We live most of the experience of this book through two main characters. Emma loses so many of her family, and seeks solace and life on the sea. Issac inherits a small parcel of land after being imprisoned, reading and gardening in order to maintain sanity and hope. Emma is encouraged to dock on a jetty, possibly by a siren of the sea, or by a memory coaxing her to tempt her fate and to live a life back on land. It is here she meets a man and his daughter, welcoming her so warmly.
Yet this book does not always follow Issac nor Emma, and there are other characters thrown in like segues or paths not taken. It is at these moments that the connections are tested between these characters - have the stories that are unfolding for Emma and Issac been told before? Are they coupled, and by what, or whom? There is a constant return to the impact of grief and loss, and how it is surrounded by optimism. There are reminders that bursting through sadness are the potential relationships that can bring joy and a renewed thirst for life.