My latest review of Kris Kneen’s astonishing novel Rite of Spring is now up at Newtown Review of Books
Two people alone on a challenging frontier, surviving physically but also dealing with loneliness and each other’s limitations, is a familiar trope. What Kneen does with it is not. This novel is a page-turning compulsion that sucks you into its tunnels and caves, into the fissures of rock and crevices of coastline carved by the Southern Ocean. Like Miranda, its protagonist, we are often underwater, rendered breathless by its defiance of taboos, its wild eroticism, its daring.
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