Susanna Moore

Celebrated American novelist Susanna Moore's reputation was confirmed by three early novels, often called "the Hawai'ian trilogy". They include the hauntingly beautiful My Old Sweetheart, The Whiteness of Bones and Sleeping Beauties. At the heart of each of these novels are girls exploring questions ... (more)about place, family and identity - themes she continues in One Last Look, a novel about an illicit relationship in colonial India. Moore's early work is rich with sensual landscapes; the novels seduce their readers while exploring the tensions brought about by troubled families and colonial legacies. Moore's most recent novels include the erotic thriller, In the Cut - made into a film by Jane Campion - and The Big Girls, a narrative about the aftermath of a brutal murder. In her later work Moore remains fascinated by the issues of identity, love, and human weakness, but as her work matures her always incisive vision becomes more graphic and, as a consequence, more disturbing. Join her in conversation with Caroline Baum.

Huck Finn got to light out, and in doing so invent his future. For boys who run away, the road is an adventure, for girls it is often a more perilous place. In contemporary literature, women on the run face unique hardships, many of which have to do with suffocating families, illicit sex, and establishing ... (more)a sense of self. Joan London's Gilgamesh and The Good Parents give us young women making their way in men's worlds; whether in Europe on the eve of war or a hotel room in Brisbane, the consequences are equally shocking. In Alligator, Lisa Moore's novel, two women struggle to make their way in the world: sassy Colleen is an eco-terrorist determined to escape small town Newfoundland, while her aunt tries to stay alive long enough to make a film. In all of Susanna Moore's novels, women negotiate twilight worlds of sex and identity, be it a steamy Hawai'i in Sleeping Beauties, colonial India in One Last Look, or prison in The Big Girls. Join these three novelists in conversation with Ingrid Horrocks on why we call women "bad girls".