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Born in Tasmania, Emily Spurr lives in Melbourne, Australia, with her partner, their twins, and a deaf, geriatric cat. Short-listed for the prestigious Victorian Premier's Unpublished Manuscript Prize, A Million Things is her first novel.
Emily Spurr's website
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How would you describe A Million Things?
It's a hopeful novel, I think. It's about grief, resilience, vulnerability and the importance of connection and community. It deals with quite dark subject matter, there's no escaping that, but at its heart it's a hopeful novel.
A Million Things follows fifty-five days in the life of ten-year-old Rae, who has to look after herself and her dog when her mother disappears. What inspired this idea?
The idea of the story came from my own life, though I'd like to emphasize that Rae's story is not my story, I am not Rae. But for a long period of my life, most of my twenties, in fact, I suffered from mental illness and the associated depression and anxiety that went along with that. It was a dark and traumatic time for me and those who loved me. I still have nightmares about that time and I wake from them panicked and feeling sick. It was after one of these dreams, as I stood in the shower washing the night out of my hair, that I considered what would have happened if I'd had a child in all that chaos and trauma. What would their life have been like? Could they have survived that? What sort of person would you need to be to survive that? And Rae was born, her voice speaking to her absent mum...
Jesse Ball was born in New York in 1978. The author of fourteen books, most recently, the novel How To Set a Fire and Why. His works have been published to acclaim in many parts of the world and translated into more than a ... (more)
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A Million Things
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Trent Dalton is an award-winning journalist at the Weekend Australian magazine. His writing includes several short and feature-length film screenplays. He was nominated for a 2010 AFI Best Short Fiction screenplay award for ... (more)
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A Million Things
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