Reading finds you.

It was jet-lag-induced sentimentality that caused me to slide Prospero’s Cell from the shelf in the first place. It caught my eye. Spine stained with damp, the pages pock-marked and soft to the touch. On the inside cover, my mother’s name in a deliberate ornate cursive, and the year ’79. A second hand in darker pencil read 39c. The book was a relic.

Nine years earlier I had left Australia for England to write a thesis on The Tempest, never intending to stay away so long. I liked the title. I had never heard of Lawrence Durrell and didn’t know you shouldn’t admit to that. My point is I went into the book with a limited attraction and very few preconceived notions. I actually thought it would make a change from my usual reading: intersectional feminism, histories of prejudice and violence. Things I read for my own understanding and work and writing. And as I said, I liked the title. I liked that it belonged to my mother shortly before she married. I was bemused by the cost. I read the blurb. A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corcyra, a pre-war travel writing memoir about Corfu. I missed Greece. Durrell was a poet apparently. I like poets.