Fiction

Sun Herald

Sunday January 4, 2009

Eleanor Limprecht

Ice

Louis Nowra

(Allen & Unwin, $32.95)

TWO Englishmen tow an iceberg into Sydney Harbour in the late 1800s, bringing cool relief to the sweltering colony. The life of one of the entrepreneurs, Malcolm McEacharn, is followed from a bleak boyhood in London to a tragically short marriage and his subsequent move to Australia. He becomes Australia's richest man but continues to be haunted by his dead wife . Unfortunately this is narrated by a modern Sydneysider whose wife is in a coma, after an attack by an ice addict (not the frozen kind). The parallel narrative and all of the musing on ice left this reader cold. EL

© 2009 Sun Herald

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