Snake

Set against the hard landscape of postwar Australia and moving through the 1950s and 1960s, "Snake" starts with a premise as frightening and commonplace as the deadly bush snake that lurks in the Australian interior: The loyal Rex, a good man, cherishes his wife Irene. Irene, bubbling over with feminine anger and unspecified desire, despises Rex. Into this marriage, this terrible emptiness, two people pour their very lives. "Snake" is about the loneliness of men married to unkind women, about the unloved becoming unlovable. Irene - an Australian Madame Bovary - moves through these pages like a force of nature. Chapter by brief chapter, Snake tells her story with archetypal force and subtlety - and a mesmerizing, zero-at-the-bone simplicity that literally propels the reader to the novel's stark climax.