Book of the Month: The Spill by Imbi Neeme

Our Book of the Month for June 2020 is The Spill by Imbi Neeme

We asked debut novelist, and winner of the 2019 Penguin Literary Prize, Imbi Neeme some of our burning questions about her new novel The Spill. Check it out below:

More About The Spill

From debut novelist, and winner of the 2019 Penguin Literary Prize, Imbi Neeme comes The Spill, an exploration of the moments - small and large - upon which our lives can pivot.

In 1982, a car overturns on a remote West Australian road. Nobody is hurt, but the impact is felt for decades. For sisters Nicole and Samantha this moment will echo through their lives and continually affect their responses to individual experiences and to each other.

Inspired by a similar event in Neeme’s childhood, The Spill examines how all our memories are fictionalised to some degree. By interweaving pieces from the sisters’ past with their present day Neeme reveals the spaces that exist between events, experiences and memory.

It is through this fickleness of memory that Neeme also delves into the complex relationship between sisters. Through seemingly unconnected episodes, from significant events as well as small moments in time, scattered throughout the novel, the relationship between them is slowly revealed in all its forms; envious, joyful, protective, regretful but most of all loving.

The Spill is a captivating depiction of the bond between sisters and a family that find its way back to one another.

“Brilliantly comic and tender, this is a sharp and intimate portrayal of that most mystifying of things: family. Neeme gives us a real world; of chaotic fragments drawn with charm and compassion. These are people, like us, making lives of their messes.” - Robert Lukins

About Imbi Neeme

Imbi Neeme is a recovering blogger, impending novelist and compulsive short story writer. Her manuscript The Spill was awarded the 2019 Penguin Literary Prize.

She was the recipient of the 2019 Henry Handel Richardson Fellowship at Varuna for excellence in Short Story Writing. Her short fiction has won prizes in the 2019 Newcastle Short Story Awards, the 2018 Boroondara Literary Awards, and has been shortlisted for the 2018 Peter Carey Short Story Award.

Her first manuscript, The Hidden Drawer, made the judges’ commended list in the 2015 Victorian Premier’s Unpublished Manuscript Awards and was selected for the 2015 Hachette/ Queensland Writers Centre Manuscript Development Program.

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