Description
Highly Commended in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards!
Coda for Shirley is the sardonic yet poignant sequel to Geoff Page’s successful 2006 verse novel, Lawrie & Shirley: The Final Cadenza. The earlier work presented an autumnal romance between an 82 year-old former ‘ladies’ man’ and a 70 year-old widow who attracts his undivided, and unprecedented, loyalty. Sadly but amusingly, Lawrie’s adult son and Shirley’s two problematic daughters conspire to disrupt the affair.
Coda for Shirley, set ten years later, starts with Shirley’s decision to leave her money directly to her two grandsons rather than to her avaricious pair of daughters. Naturally enough, the daughters don’t react well. Like its predecessor, Coda for Shirley is a romantic comedy, written throughout in Geoff Page’s seemingly effortless rhyming verse.
Actor Chrissie Shaw performs sections from Coda for Shirley at the Australian National University, 22 November 2011.
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
Page is one of our seriously underrated poets in both his solemn and comic modes; [in Lawrie & Shirley] he writes within satirical and ironic confines, but never at the expense of the love that grows between Lawrie and Shirley. He establishes character with a movie’s visual, if cartoony, economy. The supporting character studies are scalpel-sharp.
– Peter Goldsworthy, The Australian Literary Review