The Lifeboat

Graham Billing is back at his brilliant best in this, his seventh novel, The Lifeboat.
It is set in a private psychiatric hospital, a place of compassionate experiment, on the wild south-eastern coast of New Zealand which Billing knows so well.
As in the movements of a long-established quadrille, patient and therapist advance, fall back, and advance again. The new therapists, observing each other, go through a dance of their own, taking steps of discovery and possibility.
Then comes the shipwreck of a Russian fishing boat, and its aftermath. As the village people prepare for their traditional mid-winter festival, the time when they remember past wrecks and give thanks for rescues, they look half fearfully up at the hospital. They have always let patients and staff join them in their festivities, and so it is this year. But then there is the albatross
Graham Billing writes about the natural world as if it, and he, were both new-minted. Here is a novel, crafted on different levels, which celebrates the resilience of the human heart, and the triumph of hope.