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Title: Cleave

Author: Nikki Gemmell

Narrator: Kate Hosking

Format: Unabridged

Length: 6 hrs and 56 mins

Language: English

Release date: 10-19-10

Publisher: Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd

Ratings: 3 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

Snip Freeman is a painter with a waitressing problem, a wanderer in search of her past. She'll visit a place, find a man and a studio and a scrap of a job, until the zing of uncertainty pulls her on. She is anchored nowhere, touches the earth lightly. Then she turns her back on a drowning man. And suddenly she has reason to stay put.

Taking up Shiver's theme of women in tough places, Cleave illuminates the troubled relationship between wandering and settling, belonging and freedom, parents and children, partners and lovers; between white and black, secretive silences and the truth. It is a novel of great power and lyricism.

Editorial Reviews:

Kate Hosking proves she is more than up to the task in portraying the sharp-tongued, nomadic, and emotionally fraught protagonist Snip Freeman in Nikki Gemmells engrossing novel, which finds Snip venturing to the Australian Outback, or The Centre, to track down her father and quench her burning desire to find out why he abandoned her and her mother years ago.

Apart from imbuing the seemingly headstrong but emotionally fragile Snip with a humanism, she manages to capture the vastness and cultural nuances of the Outback and its natives in this engrossing Australian tale.

Members Reviews:

Great Modern Australian Story

I am making my way through all of Nikki Gemmell's books and I found this one a surprisingly light and easy read though with plenty of food for thought. It was the kind of book that had me thinking about it in between reading sessions. I wasn't a big fan of the main female character and some of her choices left me wondering - particularly her attraction to Dave.

Excellent writer

I love Nikki Gemmell's writing style, and her mastery of the written word. Being an Aussie, I readily identify with her descriptions of Australian environment both physical and social. A jolly enjoyable story, this one, with an unexpected tweak at the end, yet different (surprisingly and refreshingly so) from the other books of hers that I have read.

Five Stars

A great read about family and connection to country, hard to put own.

There is no home and no hope of one for a true artist

In spite of all it is not a book about Australia, Sudney, the desert, the Aborigenes and Tasmania. It is not abook about Helen, but Snip and Dave, a mother, a father, a daughter, a lover. Ot is a book about inspiration in art and how you can get plugged on the deepest energies of life only if you take a trip to the unknown, regularly and alone, and that unknown has to be different everytime, be it only to be unknown. It is a book athat has nothing to do with the sex of the heroin. It could have been a hero, even if it would have been so much more  natural  and hence less meaningful. Better have a woman in that role. The artist has to assume her family, her broken family, her mother and father, till the end, till the very ultimate moment of the father's pilgrimage to the very limits of the world where life and death don't matter anymore and where life is only a vision of death. The artists has to get liberated from her mother and father by learning the truth about why they separated, and why she was taken kind of hostage by her father and looked after from afar by her guardian angel mother. And when she knows, when the father has told, he is ready to pass ouot of the picture of life but she has to give him the blessing go ahead silent sign. And she does.