James Bradley – January 1 2017

World Braille Day – January 4 2017

James trained as a lawyer before becoming a novelist and critic. He currently lives in Sydney with his partner, novelist Mardi McConnochie. James has written four novels, one book of poetry and has edited two anthologies: Blur, a collection of writing by young Australian writers, and The Penguin Book of the Ocean. James has said of The Deep Field that he was keenly aware of how improbable the character of Seth, the blind paleontologist seemed and then, about three years after the book was published, he learned of a real blind person, Geerat J. Vermeij, a professor at the University of California, an important figure in the field Seth was supposed to be working in. His third novel, The Resurrectionist, is based loosely on the story of the Burke and Hare murders.

The Deep Field
Hachette Australia, 2000; ISBN 9780733611407
Haunted by the disappearance of her twin brother in Hong Kong, photographer Anna Frasier returns home to Sydney. Beginning a photographic study of fossilized shells, she meets Seth LaMarque, a blind paleontologist, and his sister Rachel, a solicitor working with the homeless. As Anna’s work proceeds she finds herself more and more involved in Seth and Rachel’s lives. But even as she is drawn into their worlds, her brother’s absence binds her to a past she can neither escape nor resolve until she returns to Hong Kong to find him. At once steely and compassionate, it weaves elements of photography, philosophy and science together into a meditation on love, time and loss

The Resurrectionist
Faber & Faber, 2006; ISBN 9780571232765
London, 1826. Leaving behind his father’s tragic failures, Gabriel Swift arrives to study with the greatest of the city’s anatomists but instead of making a name for himself, he finds himself drawn to his master’s nemesis, Lucan, and descends into the violence and corruption of London’s underworld, a place where everything and everyone is for sale, and where the taking of a life is easier than it might seem. Ten years later, another man teaches art in the penal colony of New South Wales, his spare time spent trapping and painting birds. But as becomes clear when he falls in love with one of his pupils, no-one may escape their past forever, and the worst prisons are often those we make for ourselves.