Alultery, sight and the fear
of Hindsees, hande, cirlliood
paintings and gardens - in The Orchard these notions and memories float moodily together as much fiction as fact, to spread, meandering and conversational, in the way only Drasilla Modjosla can write ..
In a world of real and imagined dangers, and a climate of hostility between men and women, how does a woman grow into her own life?
How does she place herself at the centre of her own story?
What is the nature, and potential, of her power?
Here, too, is the miraculous story that Ettic, in her eighties, tells Clara in her twenties - the legend of the silver hands...
And around this centre are threaded considerations of domination, complicity, and certainties cast into doubt.
Drusilla Modjeska, author of Poppy, has written a remark-able, risk-taking book about the terms of feminine agency.