KATHRYN HEYMAN
Storm and Grace
‘Mesmerising… Inspired.. shows how aesthetic ambition and political agenda can be simultaneously realised… Storm and Grace is at once romance and anti-romance, a melodrama and a parody, a story that seduces you and a story that shocks you into critical thinking. It is the kind of feminist work about domestic violence that Australian literary culture might have hoped for.’
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‘(Heyman) is admired for her intelligent, tense psychological stories and Storm and Grace is no exception.’
‘A slow and sinister burn, you’ll find yourself submerged in Grace’s claustrophobic world.. the prose is singular in its detail… Heyman parallels Tim Winton with her elegant and evocative descriptions of the sea.’
– Herald-Sun
‘Her writing is lush and bold… right now we need a better understanding of the narrative of abuse…. In this gripping psychological thriller, informed as it is by centuries of myths, Heyman gives us this and more.’
‘ambitious and impressive… original and compelling… a story that seduces you and a story that shocks you into critical thinking. It is the kind of feminist work about domestic violence that Australian literary culture might have hoped for.’
‘Original and compelling… Heyman steps inside that popular culture trope and tears it to shreds.’
World-famous free-diver Storm Hisray hits Grace Cain like a bolt from the blue. Instantly smitten, she abandons her life in the city to follow him to his idyllic Pacific island. There he teaches Grace the ways of the deep, and she learns to sink to unimaginable depths on one single breath. As their world narrows to the two of them, she learns, too, the dazzling pleasures of her body – but Storm hides as many secrets as the sea.
Storm begins training Grace to be his new star, and life is blissful until a female diver is featured on the cover of Sports Weekly as ‘The Mistress of the Deep’. Storm starts pushing Grace further and further beyond her limits – both in and out of the water. As her resistance grows, Storm’s temper takes a frightening turn and Grace fears she is in deeper – and more dangerous – water than she has ever imagined possible. With a secret of her own, Grace’s fears grow to haunt her, even as she prepares for one last, desperate descent. Deeper than anyone has ever been before, this will be the death-defying moment which will make both of their careers. But is death ready to be defied?
And now, a year after Grace’s record, surrounded by the world’s media, Storm prepares for the most important dive of his life. Narrated by a chorus of mesmerising sirens, Storm and Grace explores the dazzling thrill of the deep, and its dangers.
Further praise forStorm and Grace
‘Storm and Grace is a novel that seduces, murmuring in your ear, taking you into its own depths, shutting out the world so that you and the writer are the last humans in it. Artfully entwining the conventions of romantic fiction with ancient myth, ghostly voices and a rolling cloud of incoming doom, Kathryn Heyman has crafted a remarkable novel that compresses and concentrates its power before exploding with a terrible, urgent truth: love and death, the closer they get the bottom of the ocean, are inseparable. Read it and you will not forget it.’
– Malcolm Knox, author of The Wonder Lover
‘Dark, sexy, haunting – this important and timely novel is a masterful dissection of a dazzling, dangerous relationship and Heyman at her most provocative and unputdownable.’
– Jill Dawson, bestselling author of The Crime Writer
‘Thrilling, sensual and unsparing, Storm and Grace taps the deep reservoirs of myth to reveal the secret violence that moves just beneath the surface of the everyday.’
– James Bradley, critic and author of Clade
‘In Storm and Grace, Kathryn Heyman skewers the Western world’s teachings to young women about love. We watch, holding our breath, dread building, as Grace dreams and self-deludes her way through Storm’s star performance of love… all laid out in a beguiling setting of tropical beauty. Heyman deploys, maintains and contains a magnificent rage in this novel of modern courtship and age-old power games.’
– Margo Lanagan, NYT Bestselling author of Sea Hearts
‘Storm and Grace took my breath away in all of its parts: the poetry of its sentences; the sensory richness of its moments; the depths and turns of its story; and the powerful revelation of whose voices had carried me to its end. Both beguiling and brutal, it navigates an extraordinary balance between an exquisite delicacy and the potentially vast and pummelling forces of any extremity.’
– Ashley Hay, author of The Railwayman’s Wife
‘Reading Storm and Grace is like being submerged in the deep blue: enthralled, dazed, dazzled. Kathryn Heyman brilliantly demonstrates how easy it is to slip and slide from toughness to recklessness, faith to dependency, desire to possessiveness, passion to obsession.’
– Emily Maguire, author of An Isolated Incident