Staff pick: Sophie Hardcastle's "Below deck"

This book can be found here.

On the surface, a simple story of a young woman deciding to take her life in an unexpected direction after the death of her grandfather. A chance meeting with people who ‘get’ her more than she has ever felt from her parents, takes her part of the way on this journey and they remain a support system as she travels on by herself.

The words flow seamlessly in circles of colour, in streams of light and dark, in visceral description and battered and baffled feeling. The story of Oli, of how she meets, evades, excels and ignores other people’s expectations is tender and hopeful. She goes to sea which is both the answer and a terrifying question. She finds people who will test her and some who will support her but eventually she must go back to the sea to find her own answers. Oli has synaesthesia which means she hears the world in colour, but she has the same difficulty as any other young person in making sense of her world. There is a large cast of supporting characters who are developed enough to move the story forward, but this is Oli’s story alone and we hear it in her own voice and in her own colours.

 ’Someone told me a special story about death,’ Maggie says. ‘She told me that we are like rivers, all of us. We begin as clouds, and then one day we rain down and become a trickle. We grow into a stream…thicken into a river. We travel great distances, wind through all kinds of valleys and forests. Sometimes we come together with other rivers, flow together, swirl together in great lakes, part ways, flow alone…But we all meet again in the end at the river’s mouth, where we empty into the sea.’ pp. 54-5.

Oli’s sailing takes her to the Great Barrier Reef and the Great Southern Ocean; seeing whales, penguins, icebergs and the vast, restless colours of the waters of the earth. On land, she works in an art gallery and meets creative women developing their craft and asserting their own identities.

This is a debut adult fiction although the author has already published a memoir re mental illness and a YA novel. But this is grown-up territory, a poetic muse on being an adult and making adult choices; about finding your own voice and making your own space to live.

I imagine that this wind first circled in Antarctica, that it was born of silence. I imagine how it thickened, changed shape, changed direction. I imagine how it licked the sea, clawed at it, dug up waves from the deep. I imagine how it screamed in the night, shaking sailor’s knees.

And as it tears through my hair and up behind me, I find a sense of awe blooming inside my body, a deep and unswerving respect for these coarse grasses, that mother with her child, this purple earth, these people, all these wildflowers.

It’s a wild wind. Fierce and bitter and alive. Ushuaia endures.

And in that thought, I find solace. For I, too, endure. P. 252

For other books (or versions of this one), go here.

To read an article on Hardcastle's writing process, go here.

-- Wendy