Book of life

A clever three-hander where one of the central characters is a sentient novel.

- BY ANNA ROGERS

A book beginning with a book.

And that book is a narrator – one of the three main voices in this modest but memorable novel by prize-winning Australian author Angela O'Keeffe.

The others are Isabel, the buyer of the book, and her mother, Maggie. Book tells us of being purchased, signed by the author and taken home by Isabel, who is about to leave Sydney for London to meet her lover, Lewis. Both Book and Isabel recount the days in London, Book in Isabel's shoulder bag as she wanders in galleries and parks, meets Lewis for lunches, spends the afternoons in bed. The last day brings, for Isabel, the first hint of his obsessive and controlling nature but also an awareness of a “growing strangeness, a kind of weightless presence” within her – a light.

Once they are back in Sydney, Isabel ends the relationship but discovers she is pregnant, which she has always been told was impossible. There is, however, no child. This is a phantom pregnancy, very rare, but medically acknowledged.