The Bonesetter's Fee and Other Stories by Rashida Murphy
The Bonesetter’s Fee and Other Stories by Australian author Rashida Murphy is a collection of short stories that span a childhood in India and adulthood in Australia. The evocative stories in the first half of the book transport the Indian diaspora reader to a distant but still intensely familiar Indian landscape. They capture the unique cadences and life rhythms of a past era in that country. The interiority of homes and domestic landscapes features pre-eminently in the stories. Memory is a powerful trope in her writing. The domestic landscape that emerges through her writing is suffused with the joyous conviviality and haunting hostility of familial figures. The interior world of family lives takes the foreground in her stories while the outside world of the era looms quietly in the background. The characters’ beliefs, attitudes and behaviours form the prism through which the influences of the outside world on the domestic family universe can be observed and understood. The interfac