Published in 2023
368 pages
Susan Johnson was shortlisted for the 1991 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for her novel Flying Lessons, shortlisted for the 1994 National Book Council’s Banjo Award for the novel A Big Life and shortlisted for the National Biography Award 2000 for her memoir A Better Woman. Her other books include Hungry Ghosts, Messages from Chaos, Women Love Sex (editor and contributor) and Life in Seven Mistakes. The Broken Book was shortlisted for the 2005 Nita B Kibble Award; the Best Fiction Book section of the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award; the Westfield/Waverley Library Literary Award, and the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal Award for an Outstanding Australian Literary Work. Her novel, My Hundred Lovers, was published in 2012 to critical acclaim.
What is this book about?
What happens when you take your 85-year-old mother to live with you on a Greek island? A strikingly original, funny, and forensic examination of love and finding home from the author of From Where I Fell.
In life, as in myth, women are the ones who are supposed to stay home like Penelope, weaving at their looms, rather than leaving home like Odysseus. Meet eighty-five-year-old Barbara and her sixty-two-year-old writer-daughter Susan, who asked her mother-on a whim-if she wanted to accompany her to live on the Greek island of Kythera. What follows is a moving unravelling of the mother-daughter relationship told in irresistible prose.
Aphrodite’s Breath is a strikingly original, funny and forensic examination of love and finding home, amid the stories of the people, olives and wonders of the birthplace of Aphrodite.
Susan Johnson’s work has been longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Dublin IMPAC Literary Award and shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Prize, the Voss Literary Prize, the Christina Stead Award, the National Biography Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, among others.
