P A Swanborough
Pamela Swanborough started writing in 2019, winning Best Regional Writer/ runner-up Best Fiction, GMW Emerging Writers’ Competition, Writers Victoria 2019. She has short stories published in Australia and the USA. Pam is interested in almost everything, and her writing explores imbalance, the fragility of life and environment, age and memory, and fluid identity. She works in literary/speculative fiction and lyric non-fiction. Pam lives in rural Victoria and is currently working on a second major writing project while renovating a crumbling ruin with which she feels a natural affinity. Red Gifts in the Garden of Stones (Two Feathers Press, 2024) is her first novel.
Literary Fiction
Red Gifts in the Garden of Stones
Suspiciously long-lived matriarch Lizzie Coombe expects her one-hundredth birthday to be a special day. She’s always kept aloof from the neighbours; hasn’t spoken to some for over 50 years, and cares even less for their opinions. But Reverent Morgan, latest in a long line of Morgan vicars at the tiny village chapel, is affronted by events. And he finds a ready audience for his hostility. Caught inside the haunted walls of the ancestral farmhouse, aristocratic Lizzie and her solid daughter Myfanwy only know long-dead love. Lizzie’s unstable granddaughter Sarah Maud is frightened of it. Great granddaughter Jenner doesn’t seem to need love at all; is she a wise woman, or a witch? As events and people spiral out of her accustomed control, Lizzie faces her own ghosts and sees she might have to do the unexpected: care for her family. Red Gifts in the Garden of Stones is a love letter to the disappointed, invisible women; to those flawed people who think they have nothing more to learn, yet somehow find strength when it’s needed. It looks at alienation and healing, change and tradition, and the impacts of tragedy. And holding them all, the ancient landscape of South Wales. A community is defined by its history. But history can be as dry as tinder. And as red as fire.
