The Biographer’s Lover is a novel about Australia’s complex relationship with memory, and the role gender plays in the ways we represent not only national myths but our private versus our public selves

Why has no-one heard of Edna Cranmer?

When a young woman is hired to write the life of an unknown artist from Geelong, she thinks it will be just another quick commission paid for by a rich, grieving family obsessed with their own history.

But Edna Cranmer was not a privileged housewife with a paintbrush. Edna’s work spans decades. Her soaring images of red dirt, close interiors and distant jungles have the potential to change the way the nation views itself.

Edna could have been an official war artist. Did she choose to hide herself away? Or were there people who didn’t want her to become famous? As the biographer is pulled into Edna’s life, she is confronted with the fact that how she tells Edna’s past will affect her own future.

This elegant and engrossing novel explores how we value and celebrate art and artists’ lives. The Biographer’s Lover reminds us that all memory is an act of curation.

‘A delight to read. Ruby J. Murray enters the mind of an ambitious young biographer to assemble a moving portrait of a mysterious Australian painter.’ Carrie Tiffany

‘An accomplished and memorable novel about the gaps left in our inherited history, and the imperfect storytellers we entrust to fill them. Beautifully constructed.’ Abigail Ulman

Ruby J. Murray is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in many publications, including The Saturday Paper, Time Out, The Age, Meanjin, Dumbo Feather and Griffith Review. She was selected as a SMH Best Young Novelist for her debut novel, Running Dogs, which was also shortlisted in the 2013 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.