Published in 2019
240 pages
Alice Bishop was born in 1986 and grew up in Christmas Hills, Victoria, Australia. A Constant Hum, her first collection of short fiction, initially began as a response to her experience of the Black Saturday bushfires of 2009. Her broader work has also been shortlisted for Aesop / The Saturday Paper’s Horne Prize, received the Melbourne Lord Mayor’s Prize for Fiction and has been recognised in the 2018 Penguin Prize for Literary Fiction. She lives in Melbourne.
What is this book about?
Before the bushfires—before the front of flames comes roaring over the hills—the ridges are thick with gums.
After the fires, the birds have gone. There is only grey ash and melted metal, the blackened husks of cars. And the lost people: in temporary accommodation on the outskirts of the city, on the TV news in borrowed clothes, or remembered in flyers on a cafe wall.
A Constant Hum grapples with the aftermath of disaster with an eye for telling detail. Some of these stories cut to the bone; others are empathetic stories of survival, even hope. All are gripping and beautifully written, heralding the arrival of an important new voice in literary fiction.
