The Singing

by Stephanie Bishop

A love story bounded by the extremes of loss and desire, 'The Singing' tells the story of two people who fail each other in the ravages of illness. Years later they remain haunted by what they were unable to hold onto, and struggle to find a way to resolve the past.

Genres: Fiction

206 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Stephanie Bishop is a widely acclaimed novelist and critic. She is the award-winning author of four novels, The Singing (2005), The Other Side of the World (2015), Man Out Of Time (2018) and The Anniversary (2023).

She is the recipient of multiple prizes, including The Readings Prize for New Australian Writing, the Literary Fiction Book of the Year Award, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards (shortlisted), the Christina Stead Prize for fiction (shortlisted) and the Stella Prize (longlisted). Her work has been translated into four languages. In 2006 she was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Novelists of the Year.

She has received fellowships to Yaddo, Tenjinyama Art Studio, Himachal Pradesh University, and Oxford University, where she was a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Life Writing and holds a PhD from Cambridge University.

Bishop’s essays and fiction have appeared in the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The Monthly and the Sydney Review of Books, among other publications.

Reviews

[Michael Livingston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stephanie Bishop's new book The Other Side of the World blew me away, so I quickly chased up her debut at the library. There's less plot in The Singing, and an even greater focus on unpacking her character's internal life. The book jumps off with a chance meeting between the protagonist and her ex, which spirals into a series of memories and associations, painting a vivid picture of a relationship struggling to its end. Bishop switches her writing up throughout the book - drawing the reader right in with first person narration and then pivoting to a more distant third person perspective - this took me a while to get used to, but was quite effective once I'd settled in. The over-arching metaphor - love as illness - is beautifully wrought and by the end you're completely wrapped up in the story.

[Caren · Rating 5 out of 5]

After having read her 2nd and 3rd novels, I was intent on reading Bishop's first, "The Singing". And, I was blown away by its intensity and intimacy! Bishop explores the internal world of her characters as they deconstruct their own "secrets", notable in all three of her novels. She focuses here on the loss of a relationship, on the waning of love, painful, nostalgic and deeply sensual. Written in the first person, addressing her ex-lover as "you", the text has an elegiac tone, a lament about what was and can no longer be. And, yet, she often switches to describing a scene between the lovers using "he" and "she", distancing herself from the memory as we often do when we reshape it in our minds. As in her subsequent novels, Bishop provides meticulous details of place, be they rural landscapes of her past, claustrophobic descriptions of her shared home during "illness", or the urban sites of the present. And, across each of these, she remembers their passion and responds viscerally to the "fullness" that once was and to the "emptiness" that is now. The writing is beautiful and dream-like, a flipping back between past and present, mirroring how we hold onto our memories and how they edge into our present, a fluidity of time. The book is relentlessly sad as Bishop notes "That we love only to suffer, suffer to love and find things only to lose them again." Melancholy without melodrama. Incredible.

[Abby Zensea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was very touched by this book. This is the truly beautiful and honest account of a relationship, with these small things that are both insignificant and meaningful at the same time. The style is simple and honest, unique and not for everyone, I personally love it. I want to read more of this author.

[Chai1965 · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Sue van der Veer]

Not my style. Elected not to finish this one.