The Buried Life, by Andrea Goldsmith

Andrea Goldsmith confronts life’s big questions.

Three lives are at the crossroads. Adrian is an academic who specialises in the study of death. His partner of ten years, Irene, has left him and he quietly struggles to reorient his life. Kezi, neighbour and friend to Adrian, is a young artist, rejected by her fundamentalist Christian family because of her sexuality. And finally there is Laura, an accomplished town planner, who has married a self-assured yet vacuous man. Her husband Tony’s intellectual brilliance is based more in his insecurities than natural perspicacity. She genuinely loves him, but constantly finds herself walking on eggshells around his oversized ego.

One day a chance meeting brings Laura and Adrian together, and they realise they have academic interests in common. As an intimacy grows between the two - they meet for regular lunches on a bench in Melbourne’s Treasury Gardens - Laura is drawn more into Adrian’s world, and is eventually introduced to his friend, Kezi. A close knit friendship group grows between the three and is solidified when a tragedy strikes.

Andrea Goldsmith’s Melbourne-centric novel, The Buried Life, is an immersive, slow moving study of love, friendship, music and poetry. The novel concentrates on middle-class, academic lives, people living and working in Melbourne’s inner city, yet every character is easily recognisable. 

An entirely satisfying and sympathetic portrait of everyday lives, one that plumbs the depths of the soul. 

The Buried Life, by Andrea Goldsmith. Published by Transit Lounge. $34.99

March 25