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    The Last Magician
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    The Last Magician
    Unavailable
    The Last Magician
    Ebook406 pages5 hours

    The Last Magician

    By Janette Turner Hospital

    5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    This superb novel is richly textured and intellectually challenging, a tour de force from our most elegantly seductive writer. The last magician is Charlie, the photographer, who monitors and records everything as he seeks the silent Cat through physical and emotional infernos. Charlie, Cat, Robbie and Catherine shared a childhood summer in a Queensland rainforest. But a death intruded on their charmed circle, binding them to complicity and silence. Decades later, festering memories seep through into the present, in the same way as the desperate underside of a corrupt Sydney breaks through into tidy lives and well-kept streets.The Last Magician was listed in the Weekend Australian Most Notable Books of 1992 and the New York Times Best Books of 1992.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Queensland Press
    Release dateFeb 1, 2015
    ISBN9780702256127
    Unavailable
    The Last Magician
    Author

    Janette Turner Hospital

    Janette Turner Hospital was born in Melbourne and grew up in Queensland. She is currently Professor of English and Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of South Carolina.

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    Reviews for The Last Magician

    5/5

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    • 5/5
      A story of childhood friendship, love, secrets, and betrayal, set (mostly) in Australia and spanning two generations. There's a criminal underground (literally underground in this case), lush verbal depictions of photographic art, and all sorts of other goodies that play into the plot here as well.A surprise hit! Well, not really a surprise. I really like Virago as a publishing house (one of the categories in my 2014 category challenge is completely devoted to Virago books) and the critical reviews on this book were glowing, so I figured Hospital would be a good bet for a new author to try. It was sort of slow going at first. Hospital's prose is dense and dreamy and reflects the confusion of the narrator over the events happening in her life and the lives of her friends. It was such a stark contrast to the blunt prose of The Daylight Gate that I had trouble getting into it initially - plus, I'd sort of thought it was a fantasy novel and it quickly became clear that there are no magicians in this book, not in the traditional sense anyway! Somewhere in the first third of the novel, though, my impatience turned abruptly into excitement and I could not put the book down until it was finished. There are so many little twists and turns in it, so many secrets slowly revealed, that it's as gripping as a good mystery.The title is not a misnomer - there are definitely fantastic elements in here. The characters and their obsessions are all bigger than life; at the same time particular small details (like a pair of earrings with blue glass beads) reappear in surprising contexts and become potent symbols in the world of the story. There's a wonderful sense of setting in The Last Magician as well - I can remember the places in the novel almost as if I've been there. It really is a world unto itself. This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.
    • 5/5
      Twenty-somethings Lucy and Gabriel are obsessed by the mysterious events that traumatised the much older foursome of Charlie, Cat, Catherine and Robinson Gray as children, and which they still haven't got over. Lucy tells the story obliquely and it is wonderfully written, full of surprises and subtle clues to what really happened, often in the form of photographs that Charlie has taken or collected (as in the film "The Draughtsman's Contract", where the draughtsman's pictures hold clues to the murder of the landowner).
    • 5/5
      What a terrible new jacket for an eerie, gorgeous book, truly full of wonders.