The Woman Next Door

The Woman Next Door is the ninth novel by British-born Australian author, Liz Byrski. It has been many years since the women who call Emerald Street in South Fremantle home became friends as well as neighbours. While Joyce, Stella and Polly all still live next-door to each other, Helen has moved away, but stays in regular contact with her erstwhile neighbours.

Joyce and Mac are empty nesters, their adult children living across the country and across the globe, with their own families and careers; Stella is an ageing and rather eccentric actress who has been recalled yet again from retirement to reprise her much loved role in a very popular TV soap opera.

Polly is a writer whose research frequently takes her overseas, with detours via Bali to visit her brother Alistair and his partner Steve; with their sons making their own lives away from home, Helen and Dennis had taken the opportunity to sell up and leave Emerald Street for the dream apartment in North Fremantle that Helen has always wanted.

Whilst at a conference in Edinburgh, Polly meets the charming but narcissistic Leo; Joyce and Mac decide to spend a year apart to pursue their differing interests; Stella's latest acting stint reveals the onset of dementia; and Helen's unhappiness manifests in increasingly inflammatory remarks. None of them can imagine the depth of change that will be wrought in their lives over the next eighteen months

As always, Byrski expertly conveys her setting: readers even vaguely acquainted with contemporary Perth will recognise it easily, and her descriptions of overseas locations is equally well rendered; her characters, too, are familiar, and most are appealing; their dialogue can be overheard in any backyard or café.

This is a book that will appeal to a broad readership, but will resonate particularly with mature readers who are facing the sorts of issues that Byrski touches on: the approach of dementia in friends and family; the death of contemporaries; the search for fulfilment in later life; the burden of caring for the elderly and infirm.

Topical and age-old themes are also touched upon: the plight of refugees; loyalty, infidelity, deception, men's sheds, twins and long-distance relationships. Once again, Byrksi gives the reader a brilliant "hen lit" (as opposed to chick lit) book that is an enjoyable and very moving read.