Loving Sylvie

Description

Title: Loving Sylvie
Author: Elizabeth Smither
Publisher: Allen & Unwin NZ, 2019
Format: Paperback
Condition: Very Good

Description:

Sylvie rows across a lake to her wedding. Her grandfather Kit is at the oars; her grandmother Isobel waits on the dock, clutching the bridal bouquet like a spring cabbage. There’s a black swan. The water is grey-green.

That is the opening of Loving Sylvie and it tells you exactly what kind of book this is: precisely observed, quietly funny, and warm in the way that only a writer who has spent a long life paying very close attention to people can be warm.

The novel follows three generations across three cities — Sylvie in Auckland, her mother Madeleine in Paris working at Le Livre Bleu bookshop, her grandmother Isobel in Melbourne summoned to her doctor’s surgery late one afternoon. Their stories move through love affairs, rivalries, marriages, and the beautiful minutiae of everyday life — and they are woven together with the subtlety and care of someone who has written eighteen collections of poetry and knows exactly what a sentence should carry.

Elizabeth Smither was New Zealand’s Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003. She won the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry in 2008. Her collection Night Horse won the Ockham NZ Book Award for Poetry in 2018. The NZ Listener reviewer put down Loving Sylvie “feeling I’d been contemplating art.” North & South called it “deeply felt, closely observed, tightly patterned.” The Spinoff said it could “only have been written by someone whose life has been filled to every crevice with books and beautiful things.”

Why We Stock It:

A New Zealand Poet Laureate writing a novel about three women and what they carry across cities and generations — told with wry comedy, poetic precision, and the kind of warmth that accumulates over a long career. Out of print. Well worth finding.