[Singer family #prequel 01] • Dark Places

Dark Places (Albion's Story in the US) was published in 1994. It takes up the story of Lilian from the earlier novel "Lilian's Story", but this time tells the story from her father's point of view. It's a very different version of events. In Albion's eyes, Lilian is a kind of parody of himself in female form: she shares his brain and his spirit, but she comes wrapped in the mystery of female flesh. For a man who grew up in the stifling and warping conventions of Edwardian masculinity, this is profoundly disturbing, and his disturbance finally takes a terrible form. In joining himself - literally - with the repressed female within himself, he seems to triumph, but in the end the triumph belongs to his daughter.

Dark Places was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1996, was shortlisted for the MIles Franklin Award in 1995 and won the Victorian Premier's Literary Prize for fiction in 1995.