The Weekend is the hotly-anticipated follow-up to Charlotte Wood’s 2016 Stella Prize-winning The Natural Way Of Things, and Allen & Unwin were kind enough to send me a copy for review.

The story is set on one Christmas weekend, but it’s far from a cozy Christmas read. Four women—Wendy (the academic), Jude (the perfectionist), Adele (the bohemian), and Sylvie (the peacekeeper)—have been friends for decades. But now, Sylvie is dead, and the remaining three are charged with cleaning out her holiday house and readying it for sale.

It’s wonderful to see the complex interior worlds of older women reflected in contemporary fiction, to see the lives of women in their seventies represented as something other than simply “over”. This would be a great book club pick! It will inevitably bring up a Sex And The City-style debate: “which one are you?”. (I like to think I’m a Wendy, but I worry that I’m a Jude at heart.) A must-read for the fast approaching Aussie summer…

An extended review is available to subscribers at Keeping Up With The Penguins.