There Must Be More to Life
Belvedere Woman
by Ian Callinan
Arcadia, 2016, 212 pages, $29.95
The year is 1975 and Sandra Rentle, the subject of Belvedere Woman, Ian Callinan’s tenth novel, is facing her fiftieth birthday. Claire, the local dress-shop owner, probably sums her up best: “there was still something disarmingly young about Mrs Rentle … poor, spoilt, slightly stupid, slightly rich, snobbish Mrs Rentle, a nice woman, adrift, victim of her upbringing, struggling to get away from it all”.
And what she wants to flee is five decades in Thirlmere Street in Belvedere—at the centre of an enclave of twenty or thirty blocks, north of the Brisbane River, where the brilliance of the purple jacarandas, the red poincianas, and the red and purple bougainvilleas lining the streets almost distracted one from the grand houses that stood behind them—all within walking distance of the best churches (preferably Anglican), the best schools (predominantly Protestant), “and axiomatically, the best…
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