The Performance

By: Claire Thomas

Narrated by: Edwina Wren, Harvey Zielinski, Helen Morse, Lara Robinson, Melissa Madden Grey, Sylvie DeCrespigny, Tamala Shelton

'Quietly transformational'
The Times

'Innovative... an original, at-a-sitting read'
Daily Mail

'A potent meditation on the intensity of women's lives'
Charlotte Wood, author of The Weekend

'A miracle... Engaging and evocative'
Washington Post

'I loved and admired The Performance... Unmissable'
Emma Stonex, author of The Lamplighters

'Lively and intimate... The way Thomas plays with the reader is a sort of genius'
Guardian

'Thomas writes these women with such wisdom and compassion, that by the end we are all transformed'
Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground

Melbourne, Australia. As bushfires rage outside the city, three women watch a performance of a Beckett play.

Margot is a successful professor, preoccupied by her fraught relationship with her ailing husband. Ivy is a philanthropist with a troubled past, distracted by the snoring man beside her. Summer is a young theatre usher, anxious about the safety of her girlfriend in the fire zone.

As the performance unfolds, so does each woman's story. By the time the curtain falls, they will all have a new understanding of the world beyond the stage.©2021 Claire Thomas (P)2021 Orion Publishing Group

Critic reviews

Intimate, poignant and darkly funny . . . Thomas has an astute eye for social inequality, and how "wealth generates wealth, abundance delivers abundance". Her most impressive feat is to portray the novel itself as a playscript during the play's interval . . . Much like Beckett, Thomas is more interested in the untangling of inner truths than in external incident, and her novel is quietly transformational. As the curtain falls on both the book and the performance, it is us and the characters alike who are changed in thought, if not yet in deed (Shabnom Khanom)