A Brief Affair by Alex Miller, Allen & Unwin
There’s a seductive, languid poetry to Alex Miller’s writing that gently lulls the reader into his world and makes it a place you never want to leave. There, we are surrounded by a melange of sights, sounds, smells and most importantly characters, a place that is at once embracing and poignantly thought-provoking.
In A Brief Affair that universe is largely inside the head of Dr Frances Egan, a 42-year-old academic, wife and mum of 14-year-old Margie and 10-year-old Tommy, and follows what happens when an abandoned sexual encounter with a beautiful stranger on a business trip to China shifts her perfect life off-kilter. “Everything had changed,” Fran ponders. “She could see no way back to her innocence.”
“The affair has for Fran a compelling reality which she gives in to without really understanding its larger implications at the time,” explains author Alex Miller. “The experience, however, satisfies in her a longing to possess something that does not belong either to her family or to her professional life but belongs wholly to herself. A sense of her own inner world of creative possibilities is opened to her through the experience of transgressing
