Meg Mason’s First UK-Published Book Well Received

New Zealand author Meg Mason’s “moving novel”, Sorrow and Bliss, “about mental illness and sisterly love finds hilarity and wisdom in anguish, without ever diminishing pain”, Clare Clark writes in a review for The Guardian.

“In her poem ‘Tango’, 2020’s Nobel laureate Louise Glück concludes that ‘Of two sisters, one is always the watcher, one the dancer’. It is a pattern familiar from life and from literature. In fiction it is usually the watching sister who takes on the role of the storyteller,” Clark writes.

“In Sorrow and Bliss, Mason’s first novel to be published in the UK, it falls to the dancer to tell her story as she sees it, even as she dances closer and closer towards the abyss.

“Sorrow and Bliss has been justly compared to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag: both perform that peculiar miracle of making us care deeply, desperately even, for a character who does unforgivable things. It is also very funny.

“Mason pulls off something extraordinary in this huge-hearted novel, alchemising an unbearable anguish into something tender and hilarious and redemptive and wise.”

Mason’s debut novel You Be Mother was published in 2017.

Original article by Clare Clark, The Guardian, June 5, 2021.