Dimensions
154 x 234 x 25mm
Alice, Corvus and Annabel, each a motherless child, form an unlikely friendship. Alice is filled with convictions, Corvus with loss, and Annabel with a worldly pragmatism. Thrown together one summer, they make their way through an air-conditioned landscape electric with signs and portents - from the preservation of the living dead in a nursing home to the presentation of the dead as living in a wildlife museum - and peopled by restless, disengaged adults.
Annabel's father lusts after Donald, his handsome gardener, while enduring nightly visitations from his dead wife; a young stroke victim drifts westward, his luck running from bad to worse after he meets the girls; a sickly musician for whom Alice develops an attraction is drawn towards a darker solution; and an ageing big-game hunter finds spiritual renewal through his infatuation with eight-year-old Emily Bliss Pickless.
Gloriously funny and wonderfully serious, 'The Quick & The Dead' explores the vagaries of love, our thirst for meaning, and the peculiar paths by which all of us are led to our destiny.
