Is it possible to live wondrously by fluorescent light?

In The Ruin of Magic, award-winning writer Kate Holden follows in the footsteps of Katherine May, Maggie Nelson and André Aciman, crafting essays of intimate personal experience and sharply informed rumination on life in strange times.

In gorgeous prose Holden meditates on her instinctive yearning for long-ago Europe versus the natural belonging she feels to the Australian landscape, and asks, What is a home? The strongest shelter or the most lethal trap, a museum of ourselves or a showcase of fashions? What, then, does it mean to make ourselves at home in an Australia still finding its way amidst old and avoided truths? Is nostalgia a reasonable mourning of timeless lore lost or a dangerous fantasy? And what has happened to magic and beauty in the glare of modern life?

Reading Rainer Maria Rilke, Patti Smith, Walter Benjamin and D.H. Lawrence, dreamers and philosophers and poets, pagan history and new criticism, Holden writes with humour and sorrow of all the ways life today warps us under its glare – and how to find a haven in the subtle shadows.

'Elegant and whip-smart, The Ruin of Magic is a work of beauty – a sober yet joyful quest to find home and belonging.' —Susan Johnson

'Thrillingly erudite, belletristic, yet necessarily raw. Many readers will encounter this "almost private" book as the mirror they've been walking past their whole lives. The Ruin of Magic is a very lucid howl.' —Gregory Day

'A shimmering book that teases, enchants and provokes while offering balm through language and memory for our modern anguish and fear of oblivion' —Robert Dessaix