I think this book suffered from my attempt to read it on a cross-continental flight. I found it quite disjointed and struggled to follow the threads linking Stow with Carey's family. I also must confess to being basically unfamiliar with Stow's work, which further distanced me from the memoir's explorations of the geographies and landscapes of Stow's writing. ( )

A few months back while blurb-reading through the longlist for Australia's Stella Prize, the blurb of Moving Among Strangers caught my eye. I have no idea why -- I had absolutely no clue who Randolph Stow was, so really, my interest probably shouldn't have been so piqued. But it was as if this book somehow managed to exert some strange, weird pull on me and all I know is that I had to have it. While Randolph Stow, his writing, and his feelings about being a writer in Australia are all certainly a big part of this book, it is also a very personal sort of memoir of the author who, because of her interest in Stow, comes to understand more about her now-dead mother and father, and finds herself reconnected to long-absent members of her extended family. It is indeed a little gem of a book that combines her own family story to the story of this writer who penned the line "we are here as shipwrecked mariners on an island, moving among strangers, darkly." As I read through her memoir, this line out of Stow's The Girl Green as Elderflower (one of two epigraphs) came to take on a surprising amount of meaning in both lives.

Considering that I had no clue who Randolph Stow was when I first picked up this book, by the time I got to Ms. Carey's description of coming upon the location of the original merry-go-round by the sea in Geraldton, I was actually compelled to buy a copy of Stow's book of the same name. Moving Among Strangers is a lovely book that has a bit of a painful personal edge throughout that a reader can't help but to notice, offering a much more in-depth experience than say a straight-out biography of Stow would have. Ms. Carey also expresses herself in a straightforward way so as to make her book extremely reader friendly and accessible. I am not a big memoirs person, but truthfully, given that I was unfamiliar with the subject of this book, I was completely engrossed in this book the entire time I was reading it. It is definitely a book I can most highly recommend.

I've made a longer post about this book for anyone interested -- you can find it on my reading journal page here. ( )