Description

What is the nature of human love? Burt enters his office one day to find a large handwritten folder marked “CONFIDENTIAL”. The unexpected package has come from an old university mate: a charming, successful, and well-loved Australian man named Ted Harris. Twenty-five years post-university, Ted seems to have it all: a partnership in a successful law firm, respect, wealth, and the perfect wife.

However, as Burt delves deeper into these documents – which turns out to be an intensely personal confessional – he discovers that things are not what they seem, and that Ted harbours a dark and mysterious past relating to his first wife, peculiar Swiss biochemist Yvonne.

The seemingly contradictory senses of menace and sensitivity exist in an uneasy ease in Manfred Jurgensen’s writing. —Lily Brett

In The Other Wife, Manfred Jurgensen uses his unique writing style and several narrative voices to examine the internal conflicts of disease, our responsibility for those we care for, and the very nature of this undefinable thing we call love.

About the author:     Manfred Jurgensen is a bilingual poet and novelist of Danish-German background He is a multiple-award-winning writer whose works have been translated into many languages. He has taught literature at the universities of Melbourne, Monash and Queensland.  From 1984–96 he was editor of Outrider, the influential journal of multicultural literature; in 1988, with Robert Adamson he edited the bicentennial Penguin anthology, Australian Writing Now. Over the last twenty years he has also published many novels, plays, film scripts, diaries, essays, short stories, literary criticism and fourteen collections of poetry. He is a prolific translator and advocate of contemporary Australian literature.