The Sunken Road

A consummate masterpiece of structure and style, The Sunken Road belongs firmly in the bestselling tradition of Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries.

Anna’s life is the theme as well as the content of this extraordinary novel. Taking the reader from her early years (or before her birth) to her old age, each chapter reworks this theme with a cumulative effect, constantly refining, adding, illuminating and building on what has gone before, leaving the reader hanging on every word, desperate to glean the smallest new fragment of information about Anna. Her life has the flavour of melodrama: a lover lost in Vietnam, a breakdown, a boring husband, an extramarital affair, a dead child, a lesbian daughter, and gothic relatives at every turn. But the way Disher presents this material transcends its simple content. From the events in Anna’s life he derives piercing truths about the nature of regret, the impact of mortality and most importantly about the workings of memory and the nature of time.