Heartsease

April 2, 2024
Ellen 'Nelly' and Charlotte 'Lot' are as unalike as sisters come, yet they were once inseparable despite this. Lot is Nelly’s elder by eight years—an employment lawyer and single mother of two small boys who carries herself ‘neatly, gracefully’ through life. Nelly, on the other hand, relies on alcohol, acid and a variety of other substances to bear the trauma of witnessing their mother’s death 18 years prior. Heartsease, Kate Kruimink’s second novel after Vogel winner A Treacherous Country (A&U, 2021), reflects the entwined nature of Nelly and Lot’s lives by alternating between their perspectives as they meet at a silent retreat in Tasmania and attempt to reach each other through the morass of sororal love and uncertainty that separates them. Though Nelly’s friendly, often funny banter sometimes tips into the tangential, there is a slippery quality to her world that is at once eerie and alluring. Rain falls sideways, time folds and loops so that ‘things begin to run together’, and the ghost of their mother ripples just outside the window. The cracks and discrepancies between each sister’s recollection of their mother and the past make Heartsease a complex portrait of family rendered in a voice that moves between the prematurely world-weary humour of Trent Dalton’s Eli Bell (Boy Swallows Universe) and the lyrical miniatures of the Tasmanian landscape reminiscent of Robbie Arnott's work. What’s more, Kruimink’s intricate assemblage of frequently opposing viewpoints offers glimpses of the surprising depth of her characters to show us how we might survive the unbearable in the company of those we love.