LISTEN: Charlotte Wood on The Weekend

It’s been a big year for Charlotte Wood.

A recent recipient of the Order of Australia Medal for significant services to literature, the Sydney-based author is releasing her first novel since 2015’s The Natural Way of Things, a book that still casts a long shadow.

“There’s kind of a before-and-after The Natural Way of Things,” says Charlotte.

She is referring, of course, to the awed reception of that novel, in which ten young women who were involved in sex scandals are kidnapped and taken to a prison deep in the Australian bush. Evoking the brutal despair of novels such as The Handmaid’s Tale, it earned Charlotte the Stella Prize in 2016 and made her practically a household name.

“I was as surprised as anybody when it did so well,” says Charlotte, joking that many people now assume that it was her debut novel, not her fifth.

A novel with the ferocity and urgency of The Natural Way of Things would be a hard act to follow for any author, but Charlotte Wood makes it seem almost easy with her latest novel, The Weekend.

It looks away from the brutal toll that misogyny takes on women to look instead at what happens to love and friendship in old age. Three women in their seventies – the controlled and serious Jude, the chaotic intellectual Wendy, and the flaky actress Adele – gather at the home of their deceased friend Sylvie on the weekend before Christmas to clean it out before it is sold.

Over the course of the novel, it begins to dawn on them that they perhaps no longer know how to be with each other without Sylvie, who was the glue that held them all together.

“I used to think that as you get older, you know yourself better and better, but I’ve come to think that that’s not necessarily true,” says Charlotte

The Weekend is very much based on the idea that true self-perception is a fiction, exploring the uneasy gulf between your own idea of who you are and how it may differ to how another person sees you, and what happens when you become aware of it.

“That kind of destabilisation is good for fiction,” she says.

It’s a fascinating novel, funny but tender, and one that is already gathering rave reviews (our Fiction Category Manager Ben Hunter picked this as his favourite read of July). Charlotte Wood visited Booktopia to sign some copies of The Weekend and to be a guest on The Booktopia Podcast, where we chatted about the book and which of its characters we loved the most.

Listen below and grab your copy here!

The Weekend

by Charlotte Wood

The brilliant new novel from Charlotte Wood, acclaimed author of The Natural Way of Things.

Four older women have a lifelong friendship of the best kind: loving, practical, frank and steadfast. But when Sylvie dies, the ground shifts dangerously for the remaining three. Can they survive together without her? They are Jude, a once-famous restaurateur, Wendy, an acclaimed public intellectual, and Adele, a renowned actress now mostly out of work. Struggling to recall exactly why they've...

Order NowRead More

No comments Share:

About the Contributor

Olivia Fricot

Olivia Fricot (she/her) is Booktopia's Senior Content Producer and editor of the Booktopian blog. She has too many plants and not enough bookshelves, and you can usually find her reading, baking, or talking to said plants. She is pro-Oxford comma.

Follow Olivia: Twitter