In Closer Apart, Canadian fiction writer Gayla Reid enters the lives of three generations of women in the McGinty family in Australia, the land of her childhood. In linked stories spanning the country's first century as a federation, from 1901 to 2001, Reid takes us from the repressed middle-class neighborhoods of Victorian Sydney to the treacherous, muddy tracks traveled by Australian soldiers fleeing the Japanese at Rabaul to the sleepy slopes of Ardara, a sheep farm in the northern tablelands of New South Wales.
Throughout the collection, the century's wars drum ceaselessly in the background as Reid's characters struggle to make the best of the lives and times they've been given. Whether it's Ellen McGinty forfeiting the comforts of city life to work a rough piece of land alongside her husband, a near stranger, or her daughter Alice finding joy --- and losing it --- in the flax fields of the state of Victoria, the women and men figured here are well acquainted with sacrifice but finely tuned to the power of sexual love and their fragile connection to the earth.
