MONDAY 29 APRIL 2024 | INSTORE EVENT
6.00pm for a 6.30pm start
Join us for the launch of Kirsty Iltner's debut novel, Depth of Field, winner of the Dorothy Hewett Award. Kirsty will be in conversation with Jennifer Bowden.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Tom’s longest-standing commitment is his run-down house Mayfield, which hasn’t been the same since Adeline. He’s stuck in the past drowning his sorrows in too many bottles of wine and an unfulfilling photography business. Unable to move on Tom is treading water in a low-commitment relationship. The only problem—she isn’t Adeline.
Lottie is living with her baby, Coral, in a cramped flat above a fish and chip shop. Struggling to make ends meet, all she wants is to find connection—with her distant mother, the parent’s group, her old school friends, but Lottie straddles too many different worlds to quite fit into any of them. She doesn’t have much, but at least her and Coral have each other.
Told through alternating perspectives, Kirsty Iltners’ debut novel examines the lives of two isolated individuals to reveal the fragility of life and the fallibility of our memories. Winner of the 2023 Dorothy Hewett Award, Depth of Field is a gripping novel where the mechanisms of photography are allowed to falter just enough to expose how selective and unreliable our memories are, especially when parts of the truth are left out of the frame.
“Masterful, poignant, heartbreaking.”
—Siang Lu
“Affecting, innovative and original. Such an impressive debut novel.”
—Brendan Ritchie
“An incredible debut full of love, grief, regret – how trauma can collapse the lives it affects –
and the possibility of redemption.”
—Graham Akhurst
“Depth of Field in essence is portraiture taken at the young edges of society.
Iltners’ protagonists grapple with social isolation, new parenthood, poverty, and dependence.
Skilfully stitched together, this is a novel that exposes the truth as grainy and low-res;
as unreliable as a photograph.
A compelling debut from a striking new literary talent.”
—Sarah Sasson
“Depth of Field is like a cosy rogue’s gallery scattered up a staircase wall.
But what lies just beyond the camera’s focus? The framed moments?
Kirsty Iltner’s dazzling debut peers beyond the composed filtered shots we curate for public viewing.
What happens if we adjust the lighting, fiddle with the focus, or expand the view?
What do we choose to remember and what can we never forget?
Memory is a slippery tale and this one delivers.”
—Sharlene Allsopp
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kirsty Iltners is a writer and photographer. She has a degree in psychology and is currently studying law. She lives on Jagera and Turrbal Country in Brisbane with her two daughters, her border collie, and three axolotls. Depth of Field is her first novel which won the 2023 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript.
