{"title":"Ceridwen Dovey","description":"\u003cp\u003eCeridwen Dovey is a celebrated author known for her thought-provoking storytelling and deep exploration of the human psyche. Through her captivating narratives, Dovey weaves intricate tales that blend elements of fiction and reality, inviting readers to explore the delicate intersections of life, culture, and identity.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eHer diverse range of works includes the intriguing novel \u003cem\u003eIn the Garden of the Fugitives\u003c\/em\u003e, which plunges into the complexities of guilt and memory, and the insightful \u003cem\u003eLife After Truth\u003c\/em\u003e, a tale reflecting on the pressures of modern life and the pursuit of authenticity. In \u003cem\u003eOn JM Coetzee\u003c\/em\u003e, Dovey provides an insightful analysis of the renowned author, showcasing her adeptness in arts and culture critiques.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eReaders of \u003cem\u003eOnly the Animals\u003c\/em\u003e are offered a unique and imaginative journey through the perspective of animals caught in the human world's turmoil. Dovey continues to explore the bounds of creativity in her compelling work, \u003cem\u003eOnly the Astronauts\u003c\/em\u003e, demonstrating her flair for general fiction.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eDiscover Ceridwen Dovey's exceptional collection at our bookstore and immerse yourself in stories that challenge perceptions and stir the soul. Whether you're drawn to general fiction or arts and culture, Dovey's books offer profound insights and captivating narratives that are sure to leave a lasting impression.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"only-the-animals-by-ceridwen-dovey-9780143573012","title":"Only the Animals","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eExquisitely written, playful and poignant, \u003cem\u003eOnly the Animals\u003c\/em\u003e is a remarkable literary achievement by the award-winning Ceridwen Dovey, one of our brightest young writers. Perhaps only the animals can tell us what it is to be human. The souls of ten animals caught up in human conflicts over the last century tell their astonishing stories of life and death.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn a trench on the Western Front, a cat recalls her owner Colette's theatrical antics in Paris. In Nazi Germany, a dog seeks enlightenment. A Russian tortoise once owned by the Tolstoys drifts in space during the Cold War. In the siege of Sarajevo, a bear starving to death tells a fairytale. And a dolphin sent to Iraq by the US Navy writes a letter to Sylvia Plath...\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAn animal's-eye view of humans at our brutal worst and our creative best, \u003cem\u003eOnly the Animals\u003c\/em\u003e asks us to believe again in the redemptive power of reading and writing fiction.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e'The most original, surprising and inspired book I read this year.' - Stephen Romei, Weekend Australian\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e'An audacious work of the imagination ...Funny, tragic, smart, arch, poignant and playful all at once.' - Catherine Armitage, The Age\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e'Dazzling ...An ambitious book with a fable-like surface, and a whole churning world beneath.' - Romy Ash, The Guardian (Australia)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eOnly the Animals\u003c\/em\u003e is mesmerizing and exhilarating, funny and moving. It has elements of strangeness and greatness, like Kafka. Dovey's exquisitely drawn creatures grapple nobly with their animal natures, a genius point of view from which to illuminate how we humans - ostensibly conscious and verbal - are trapped in ours. This book feels like a major mind announcing itself.' - Anna Funder\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e'Wholly extraordinary.' - Michelle de Kretser\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e'The life stories related by these very civilized animals are in some cases touching (the elephant), in others amusing (the mussel), but all are absorbing. They are transmitted to us with a light touch and no trace of sentimentality.' - J.M. Coetzee\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e'An audacious work of the imagination ...An extraordinary series of fabulist tales ...The yarns are funny, tragic, smart, arch, poignant and playful all at once.' - The Saturday Age\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e'The emotional heat here is pitched at Bunsen burner blue - hard and clear, without a flicker of showy sentiment - while the main criticism that might be launched against such stories, that they traffic in naive anthropomorphism, is checked at every move by a rigorous deployment of contemporary developments in animal psychology and neuroscience. The best of the stories are not only smart in a modern, scientific sense, however; they keep one foot in the older, folkloric tradition of animal stories, and in a wonder that is as old as our species ...What Dovey ventures is to rescue animals from the cultural margins. To be seen by animals is a profound inversion of the situation where it is we who do the watching. The results are sometimes profound, and always powerfully disconcerting.' - Weekend Australian\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e'I was unprepared for the anarchic brilliance of this wonderful book. Dovey persuades us of her characters as she teeters on the edge of sentimentality, but in the next breath she dances back and \u003cem\u003eOnly the Animals\u003c\/em\u003e becomes a kind of conversation that anticipates the reader's - at least, this reader's - response and parries it ...it is an examination - there is palpable restraint on the page and Dovey draws no conclusions. \u003cem\u003eOnly the Animals\u003c\/em\u003e is a glorious imaginative leap, not into the minds of animals, but into our own. The idea that fiction can be both playful and profound.' - Weekend Australian\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Penguin Random House NZ","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46532381212908,"sku":"9780143573012","price":24.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/2446313482239.jpg?v=1749312951"},{"product_id":"in-the-garden-of-the-fugitives-by-ceridwen-dovey-9781926428598","title":"In the Garden of the Fugitives","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFrom the award-winning author of \u003cem\u003eOnly the Animals\u003c\/em\u003e comes an unputdownable novel of obsession, guilt, and the power of the past to possess the present.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAlmost twenty years after forbidding him to contact her, Vita receives an email from her old benefactor, Royce. Once, she was one of his brightest protegees; now her career has stalled and Royce is ailing, and each has a need to settle accounts.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eBeyond their murky shared history, both have lost beloveds, one to an untimely death, another to a strange disappearance. And both are trying to free themselves from deeper pasts, Vita from the inheritance of her birthplace, Royce from the grip of the ancient city of Pompeii and the secrets of the Garden of the Fugitives. Between what's been repressed and what has been excavated are disturbances that reach back through decades, even centuries.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAddictive and unsettling, \u003cem\u003eIn the Garden of the Fugitives\u003c\/em\u003e is a masterpiece of duplicity and counterplay, as brilliantly illuminating as it is surprising—about the obscure workings of guilt in the human psyche, the compulsion to create, and the dangerous morphing of desire into control. It is the breakthrough work of one of Australia's most exciting emerging writers.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Penguin Random House NZ","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46549262762220,"sku":"9781926428598","price":34.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/24611313482873.jpg?v=1749893821"},{"product_id":"life-after-truth-by-ceridwen-dovey-9781760895365","title":"Life After Truth","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAt their fifteen-year reunion, a group of Harvard graduates—labouring with early middle age, marriage and children, unrealised aspirations and a depressing political climate—rekindle old loves and old resentments.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFifteen years after graduating from Harvard, five close friends on the cusp of middle age are still pursuing an elusive happiness and wondering if they've wasted their youthful opportunities. Jules, already a famous actor when she arrived on campus, is changing in mysterious ways but won't share what is haunting her. Mariam and Rowan, who married young, are struggling with the demands of family life and starting to regret prioritising meaning over wealth in their careers. Eloise, now a professor who studies the psychology of happiness, is troubled by her younger wife's radical politics. And Jomo, founder of a luxury jewellery company, has been carrying an engagement ring around for months, unsure whether his girlfriend is the one.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe soul searching begins in earnest at their much-anticipated college reunion weekend on the Harvard campus, when the most infamous member of their class, Frederick—senior advisor and son of the recently elected and loathed US president—turns up dead.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eOld friends often think they know everything about one another, but time has a way of making us strangers to those we love—and to ourselves.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Penguin Random House NZ","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46549815165164,"sku":"9781760895365","price":34.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/26340593482814.jpg?v=1749928104"},{"product_id":"only-the-astronauts-by-ceridwen-dovey-9781760896775","title":"Only the Astronauts","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA transformative new collection from the award-winning author of \u003cem\u003eOnly the Animals\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eCeridwen Dovey has a rare, wild genius. The stories in \u003cem\u003eOnly the Astronauts\u003c\/em\u003e are extraordinary, funny, delightful and moving. Dovey sees tenderly what it is to be human - from a perspective that is out-of-this-world imaginative.\u003c\/em\u003e - Anna Funder\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAdrift in outer space, a motley crew of human-made objects tell their tales, making real history sweeter and stranger.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eStarman, a lovelorn mannequin orbiting the Sun in his cherry-red car, pines for his creator. The first sculpture ever taken to the Moon is possessed by the spirit of Neil Armstrong. The International Space Station, awaiting deorbit and burial in a spacecraft cemetery beneath the ocean, farewells its last astronauts. A team of tamponauts sets off on a perilous mission to Mars inspired by the courage of their predecessors. The Voyager 1 space probe - carrying its precious Golden Record - is captured by Oortians near the edge of the solar system and drawn into their baroque, glimmering rituals.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eBy turns joyous and mournful, these object-astronauts are not high priests of the universe but something a little... weirder. From their inverted perspectives, they observe humans both intimately and from a great distance, bearing witness to a civilisation unable to live up to its own ideals. And yet each still finds in our planet - in their humans - something worthy of love.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePRAISE FOR CERIDWEN DOVEY'S \u003cem\u003eONLY THE ANIMALS\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e'Transmitted to us with a light touch and no trace of sentimentality.'\u003c\/em\u003e - J.M. Coetzee\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e'Wholly extraordinary.'\u003c\/em\u003e - Michelle de Kretser\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e'A fable-like surface, and a whole churning world beneath.'\u003c\/em\u003e - Guardian\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e'A form of lyrical anthropology.'\u003c\/em\u003e - Canberra Times\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e'Anarchic brilliance.'\u003c\/em\u003e - The Age\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Penguin Random House NZ","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46671181545708,"sku":"9781760896775","price":35.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/26354693482814.jpg?v=1752803173"},{"product_id":"a-concise-compendium-of-wonder-by-jennifer-mills-9781763847545","title":"A Concise Compendium of Wonder","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA radical collection of reimagined fairytales from three incredible Australian authors, for readers of all ages.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the middle of a great famine, two siblings are cast out into a forest that holds both danger and beauty. Perpetual winter descends upon a giant’s garden after rowdy children are shut out by a massive wall. In the year 3099, humans find themselves stranded on the Moon and turn to their one remaining tree for wisdom.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAt the centre of each of these stories is an urgent question about humanity’s relationship with nature. But there is also a tiny seed of hope.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBased on the Brothers Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel, Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant and Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl, this epic collection from award-winning authors Ceridwen Dovey, Ursula Dubosarsky and Jennifer Mills is destined to be a favourite for all generations.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA Concise Compendium of Wonder is published to coincide with the Slingsby theatre production of the same name, premiering at the Adelaide Festival in March 2026, and includes illustrations by Lorelei Medcalf.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEducation notes available here\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Simon \u0026 Schuster NZ","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47073793835244,"sku":"9781763847545","price":36.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/2efcc8a7d36b6478f2a86fd1a7e94bc3.jpg?v=1765177798"},{"product_id":"on-jm-coetzee-by-ceridwen-dovey-9781760640613","title":"On JM Coetzee","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFrom South Africa to Australia, Dovey draws on family history to explore the Nobel Prize-winning writer's work, tracing an intellectual heritage that has been passed from mother to daughter.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eI was born in the year J.M. Coetzee published his third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians.\u003c\/em\u003e My mother read this dark, disturbing book with its multiple scenes of torture as she breastfed me at night, while my older sister slept and the house was quiet. It was 1980. The apartheid government had declared a state of emergency in the face of growing internal revolt, and my parents were thinking of leaving South Africa again.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFor Ceridwen Dovey, J.M. Coetzee 'has always been there, an unseen but strongly felt presence in our small family drama'. As a child, she observed with fascination her mother's immersion in Coetzee's writing as she worked on what would become the first critical study of his early novels. Even now, as a writer herself, Ceridwen's relationship with Coetzee's books is still mediated by her mother's readings of them—to get to him, she must first step through her mother's formidable mind. With tenderness and insight, Dovey draws on this personal history to explore the Nobel Prize-winner's work—how his books 'do theory' on themselves—while also tracing the intellectual heritage that has been passed from mother to daughter.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn the Writers on Writers series, leading writers reflect on another Australian writer who has inspired and fascinated them. Provocative, crisp, and written from a practitioner's perspective, the series starts a fresh conversation between past and present, writer and reader. It sheds light on the craft of writing and introduces some intriguing and talented authors and their work. Published by Black Inc. in association with the University of Melbourne and State Library Victoria.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAlso available in the \u003cem\u003eWriters on Writers\u003c\/em\u003e series:\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cul\u003e\n  \u003cli\u003eAlice Pung on John Marsden\u003c\/li\u003e\n  \u003cli\u003eErik Jensen on Kate Jennings\u003c\/li\u003e\n  \u003cli\u003eChristos Tsiolkas on Patrick White\u003c\/li\u003e\n  \u003cli\u003eNam Le on David Malouf (forthcoming)\u003c\/li\u003e\n  \u003cli\u003eMichelle de Kretser on Shirley Hazzard (forthcoming)\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Penguin Random House NZ","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47082337894636,"sku":"9781760640613","price":26.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/23793073482814.jpg?v=1765273515"}],"url":"https:\/\/bookhero.pro\/collections\/ceridwen-dovey.oembed","provider":"Book Hero","version":"1.0","type":"link"}