Sincerely, Ethel Malley

Author(s): Stephen Orr

Aust Fiction | South Australian Authors

In the darkest days of World War II, Ethel Malley lives a quiet life on Dalmar Street, Croydon. One day she finds a collection of poems written by her late (and secretive) brother, Ern. She sends them to Max Harris, co-editor of modernist magazine Angry Penguins. He reads them and declares Ern an undiscovered genius. Determined to help publish the poems, Ethel moves in with Max and soon becomes a presence he can’t understand, or control. He gets the feeling something’s not quite right. About Ethel. About Ern. Then two poets come forward claiming they wrote Ern’s poems. What follows is part-truth, part-hoax, a dark mystery as surreal as any of Ern’s poems. Max wants to believe in Ern, but to do this he has to believe in Ethel, and attempt to understand her increasingly unpredictable behaviour. Then he’s charged with publishing Ern’s ‘pornographic’ poems. The questions of truth and lies, freedom of speech, and tradition versus modernism play out in a stifling Adelaide courtroom, around the nation’s wirelesses, and in Max’s head. Based on Australia’s greatest literary hoax, Sincerely, Ethel Malley explores the nature of creativity and human frailty. It drips with the anaemic blood of Australian literature, the gristle of a culture we’ve never really trusted.

Matilda Bookshop Review


A work of vivid imagination, that also brings into sharp focus the entire notion of creativity, ..Ethel Malley is a fascinating novel from one of South Australia’s finest writers. Told from the perspective of a fictitious sister of a fictitious character, it re-tells the still astonishing Ern Malley/ Angry Penguins hoax in vivid detail. Orr’s Adelaide of the 1940’s is beautifully drawn, as are the larger than life characters such as Max Harris, and at the end you’re left with the eternal question about whether art needs to be authentic to be meaningful. Gavin

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Product Information

General Fields

  • : 9781743058084
  • : Wakefield Press Pty, Limited
  • : Wakefield Press
  • : 0.45
  • : January 2021
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : 823.4
  • : English
  • : 2104
  • : Paperback
  • : Stephen Orr