Miranda Darling’s short novel opens with an epigraph from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, about life’s “little daily miracles”. Like Mrs Dalloway, another of Woolf’s novels, Thunderhead is set over the course of a single day and follows a wealthy woman preparing for a dinner party. Darling’s narrator, Winona Dalloway, even shares her surname.
Per the jacket copy, Winona is “seemingly unremarkable”: she is tanned, slender and tastefully dressed; a woman brightly devoted to her two sons, balancing the domestic pressures of a “motherwifeperson” in the leafy harbourside “suburbs of the east” (almost definitely Sydney) against the pull of a more questing, private self. The story unfolds through her inner monologue, a voice spilling over with abundant vocabulary, title case and Theories About Life. But in her outer world, the reader soon implies, something is out of kilter.
