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Every Secret Thing by Marie Munkara

by
April 2010, no 320

Every Secret Thing by Marie Munkara

University of Queensland Press, $24.95 pb, 181 pp

Every Secret Thing by Marie Munkara

by
April 2010, no 320

From its opening line – ‘It had been a shit of a day for Sister Annunciata and Sister Clavie’ – Marie Munkara’s collection of stories about life on an island mission in northern Australia is a raw, hilarious and penetrating chronicle. The two nuns stare at the sky waiting for the bishop. His plane overshoots the airstrip and lands with a ‘resounding crump’. It is as if the bishop – ‘his Most Handsome and his Most Distinguished’ or ‘his Most Sleazy’, depending on which nun you ask – represents wave after wave of invasion. Apart from God and His earthly representatives, the islanders over the years also confront an anthropologist, Indonesians, a naked French couple, Spanish workers, marijuana, rum, the flu and even John Wayne.

Patrick Allington reviews 'Every Secret Thing' by Marie Munkara

Every Secret Thing

by Marie Munkara

University of Queensland Press, $24.95 pb, 181 pp

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