Foreign Attachments

In this beautifully constructed Russian doll of a novel, two Australian women leave their homeland in search of a room of their own in which to forge their art. Stella Bowen studies painting in London where she meets, among other literati, wild Ezra Pound, and the bearlike, charming Ford Madox Ford with whom she lives in the countryside, has a child and enters the glittering life of Paris in the 1920s where she struggles to survive and paint, and where the likes of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas and Jean Rhys dance in and out of her life. A century later, Neve leaves Australia for life in Paris with the suave Antoine to write her novel on Bowen's life. Each woman is captured by love and confronted with betrayal and obstacles in the pursuit of her art.By skilfully building a novel within a novel, Roslyn McFarland's Foreign Attachments delivers a deeply entertaining and life-filled portrait of the lives of creative women in a novel as richly rendered as one of Bowen's exquisite paintings.JO GARDINER