A children's picture book, published in May 2012 by Penguin. The text is by Carmel Bird, and the illustrations are by Kerry Argent.

Carmel was inspired to write the story when she read that urban foxes often collect shoes which they then hoard in their dens.

Finola is a bright young fox, planning to open a gallery where she will display her collection of designer shoes.

She longs to find the pair to a beuatiful green shoe.

Helping her in her quest is Frederick Fox.

Will romance blossom between these two gorgeous creatures?

HOME TRUTH

Child of the Twilight

The novel was launched by Ian Britain in February 2010 Ian: "These days I give a new novel I may pick up about twenty minutes to get me hooked. I give it up after that if I’m not confident of two things: that it’s going to be about everything, and that I’m going to find myself coming into it. ‘My idea of a writer,’ says Susan Sontag, is ‘someone interested in everything.’ Carmel Bird’s new novel is not just about everything but is set in everyone’s favourite places and written in every manner and mode. There’s birth, death, sex, religion, art, food, fashion, war, family, schooldays, technology, magic, innocence, crime, love, pain and the whole damned thing. There’s Sydney, Melbourne, New York, Rome, Venice, Paris, Barcelona, Portugal, Mexico, Gethsemane and Woodpecker Point. And it’s all wrapped up in a style that, with brilliant, knowing playfulness, makes Gothic and Grand Guignol seem colloquial, normal, everyday, while lending a sublimity to cliché, a transcendence to bathos. My favourite character, lethally portrayed, is a headmistress, Dr Silver, who’s a Mrs Malaprop of platitudes. ‘Medieval legend or soap?’ the narrator asks at one point. We get the best of both worlds here, as Dr Silver might answer. But it’s true. Where in this fantastic confection could I possibly find myself? As it turns out, in several strands of the plot, and in various aspects of nearly all the characters, even minor ones. The action centres around the hunt for a missing religious statue, and celebrates the ‘thrill of getting control of an object that should be out of your reach’. Only a few weeks before I came to read this book I was involved in a hunt, not for a sacred object, but a very profane one – the missing diaries of a notorious artist whose biography I’m writing. These had been missing for nearly 65 years. Through extraordinary luck I turned them up in the most unlikely place. Carmel Bird’s novel not only captures the thrill of the chase, the fanatical urge, the mad hope that I came to feel so keenly but also the inordinate sense of miracle when the grail is actually located. But this is only one of multitudinous connections I found with my own life, career, sensibility. ‘I am drawn to secret autobiography expressed in code,’ says the narrator at another point. Any other reader, I’m convinced, will find his or her own autobiography here too. It’s spooky, but this book knows you better than you’ll ever know this book. That’s part of its enduring mystery, both in the sense of a deeply spiritual drama and the curliest crime fiction. Thus does it combine in one the two genres of which Carmel has long been a recognised master. Rush out to buy it and be spooked."

Click on the video below to hear Carmel discussing the book.

The video clip here requires QuickTime

About the Novel

"It is strange and fascinating to me to think of people – Avila in particular – praying me into existence."

Sydney Peony Kent is a nineteen year-old American. She was a longed-for IVF baby, 'product of an unknown egg and unknown sperm' implanted in her mother, Avila. Avila not only used the latest scientific techniques to conceive Sydney, but also prayed to the Bambinello, a small carved and jewelled statue of the infant Jesus housed in the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli in Rome and is said to have miraculous properties. Avila's distant relative, Father Roland Bruccoli, was conceived in a more conventional manner, but his mother too prayed to the Bambinello before his birth -- and that of his twin sister Eleena. It is when the adult Roland is visiting the church of Santa Maria one evening that the Bambinello is stolen. Roland hopes that Father Cosimo, an archivist, poet and riddler said to speak in the ancient green language of the troubadours, can assist in discovering what has happened to the Bambinello. But when matters of belief are involved, nothing is straightforward, as Sydney discovers herself when she too becomes caught up in tracing the Bambinello's fate.

Deftly weaving together religion, science, pregnancies wanted and unwanted, love, loss and belief, Carmel Bird has created a luminous novel that both questions and celebrates the miraculous.

GABRIELLE LORD COMMENTS

"Earthy, grounded, yet singing to the heart and spirit with its delicious writing, Child of the Twilight by Carmel Bird invites the reader to consider the enormous mysteries of existence—the winking in and out of earthly existence that we call ‘life’-- from a highly original perspective. The filmy boundaries between worlds are tested as 19 year-old Sydney, herself the result of Assisted Reproduction, without any knowledge about her genetic origins, narrates the stories of the lives, dreams, prayers and desires of the people in her orbit. This creates a rich, multi-layered novel.The mystery of the stolen Bambinello an image of the Holy Child, vanished from his shrine in an act of sacred theft (the Furta Sacra of medieval times) provides a subtle template for readers to understand the events of our lives. The writing, always fresh and brilliant, alternatively dances and pounces. Child of the Twilight is the sort of book that keeps on unfolding in the imagination, long after you’ve finished reading it."
Gabrielle Lord

+++ALSO+++

IN JULY 2010
HARPERCOLLINS WILL PUBLISH
AN ANTHOLOGY EDITED BY CARMEL.
THIS WILL BE
A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS BY TEN AUSTRALIAN WRITERS ON THE MEANING OF HOME.
THE TITLE IS

HOME TRUTH

+++

Carmel's most recent book on writing is a manual on how to write memoir, Writing the Story of Your Life, which was published in 2007. In 2006 she published a collection of short fiction,
The Essential Bird. In 2005 she published a literary novel
Cape Grimm. These three examples of her work are a reflection of three of her strengths - novel, short story and the teaching of writing skills. She has also written essays which are collected in
Automatic Teller, published in 1996. In 2000 Carmel edited an anthology of short fiction spanning the twentieth century,
The Penguin Century of Australian Stories, and in 1998 she edited the oral histories of members of the stolen generations of indigenous Australians in The Stolen Children, Their Stories.

There is a full list of publications on the BOOKS page.

Carmel grew up in Tasmania, and the influence of the landscape and history of the island is often apparent in her work, in such examples as the ballet she wrote for Tasdance in 2003,
Fair Game, and in her radio play on the life of an indigenous Tasmanian girl, Mathinna, titled In My Father's House, broadcast on ABC Australia and on the BBC.

In 2000 Peter Long's film version of Carmel's story
A Telephone Call For Genevieve Snow won the Silver Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival.

Carmel has taught writing to students in schools, universities and communities, and has edited several literary journals.