Solstice

by Matt Rubinstein

Solstice is a novel in verse set over the twenty-four hours of the longest day of the year, in Adelaide, South Australia. It is a story of love and exploration told in sonnet form, one verse for each few minutes of the day. It shows how much can change in a day—the whole world, and at the same time nothing at all.Solstice was shortlisted for the 1993 Australian/Vogel Award and was published by Allen & Unwin in 1994. This electronic edition is a new author's cut that takes full advantage of recent developments in the field of poetry.

252 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

I started writing when I was six years old. "Writing" for me meant typing out Enid Blyton books on an old typewriter, word-for-word. Later I learned that writing was more than typing, it was invention; but I also heard that great writers like Hunter S Thompson had also copied out books like The Great Gatsby, in order to feel their construction from the inside.

When I was eleven my mother became a writer, and later she became another writer: first the children's author Gillian Rubinstein, and then the historical fantasy writer Lian Hearn. She taught me the true occupation of writing: I read early drafts of her books and saw the way she revisited and refined them, turning them from ideas into great stories.

At university I wrote a novel in sonnet form inspired by Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate. That book was Solstice, which was shortlisted for the Australian/Vogel literary award for unpublished manuscripts and later published by Allen & Unwin. I was asked to turn it into a play for the Adelaide Festival; I was lucky enough to work with some of Australia's best actors and musicians. After that I wrote Nomad, a novel based loosely on my travels in Europe, and it was published by Hyland House.

I then wrote Death of the Author, a post-modern serial killer thriller about a sinister character called The Reader who hunts down writers gathered for a festival of "multiple homicide fiction" in Adelaide. It was accepted by a publisher who then restructured and stopped publishing fiction; and it got me an agent who retired shortly afterwards. The book had kind of fallen between the cracks but I published it as an e-book this year.

I wrote a sequel to Solstice called Equinox, which was serialised on the website of the Sydney Morning Herald and which I am now tweeting over the course of a year. At the same time I wrote a literary mystery novel featuring an untranslatable manuscript that has a dangerous effect on anyone who tries to translate it, a little like the real-life Voynich manuscript. That book was runner-up for the Vogel award and was published as A Little Rain on Thursday in Australia by Text, as Vellum in the UK by Quercus, and by various European publishers.

While working on my most recent novel I became interested in the opportunities technology presents for writers and readers: I built my website, started to use Twitter, and wrote and spoke a lot about the future of the book. In 2012 I won the Calibre Award for my extended essay "Body and Soul: Copyright Copyright Law and Enforcement in the Age of the Electronic Book", which argues that traditional publishers are in real danger from alternative publishing models. I'm now putting my money where my mouth is and experimenting with electronic publishing.

Reviews

[Shallowreader VaVeros · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book Is written in verse about the 24hrs the lives of a number of characters during the day of Summer Soltice. A mesmerising read. Stellar.