About the Book:

Mardi McKee, prodigal daughter, arrives at her father’s home in Lithgow, Australia, after drifting overseas for eighteen months. Her previous life is a memory. Her mother has died, she is divorced and is estranged from her former lover, Ian. Mardi had left Ian, at dawn before he awoke, with no explanation, only months after ending her marriage.

Ian’s teenage sister, Claudia, has also arrived, escaping her childhood home for Ian’s. Spiky, lovable, lost, Claudia forges an intense friendship with Mardi. But Mardi finds that repairing her relationship with Ian is not so easily done. Mardi is hiding something, and Ian is having none of her quest for forgiveness, not until she explains why she vanished without a trace.

Set between country New South Wales, inner city Sydney, and Europe, Ordinary Human Love follows Mardi as she discovers that the greatest love she will ever feel is for the man she left. In this powerful and complex debut, Melissa Goode interrogates what makes a life worthwhile, and has created a vivid, intricate portrait of the relationships that shape and connect us, and the all-consuming nature of desire.

Published by Ultimo Press

Released May 2024

My Thoughts:

Ordinary Human Love is the debut novel of Australian writer, Melissa Goode, but while this may be her first novel, she deftly demonstrates that she is no novice when it comes to writing with a depth of feeling. Ordinary Human Love was to me, a story that was rich with vulnerability. I felt my way through this story, hand in hand with characters that were perfectly imperfect.

While the novel is told from the perspective of Mardi, the story is so well crafted that we are able to gather a keen sense of the emotional state of the other major players. Ian, in particular, was both transparent and closed off: transparent in his hurt and love for Mardi but closed off to her as a means of self-preservation. Claudia was similar in her feelings to both Mardi and Ian. She craved their attention, their approval, yet acted out repeatedly, as though to give them reason to withdraw from her.

Mardi is a lost soul, grieving deeply for her mother and as the one-year anniversary of her mother’s death looms, she has returned to her family home to find all memories of her mother removed, her father living there as a bachelor, disapproving of Mardi’s divorce, exit from her career, her affair with Ian, her lack of motivation to re-enter the rat race of practising law and living in Sydney, and most of all, her still present grief for her mother. He is obnoxious, opinionated, an alcoholic, a disgraced Magistrate that was shipped to the country with a demotion to his career but not, unfortunately, to his ego. I disliked him intensely. Mardi was a mess, but I really liked her. I had a lot of empathy for her situation.

The story is crafted in a way where we meet Mardi and Ian at the end of their affair, or rather, eighteen months later. Ian is angry, rightly so, she abandoned him and disappeared without a trace. Mardi is pining for him, knows she did wrong by him, but desperately wants his forgiveness. She is still in love with him. Her leaving him, had nothing to do with her feelings for him, yet he can’t understand that. Melissa Goode gently peels back the layers of their intense relationship in bursts between the present day, reflections back and forth, until we have the whole picture.

I enjoyed this novel so much. It’s themes of grief and loss, love and relationships, self-destruction and self-care all blended into a beautiful story that had me pining for more after I turned the last page. Highly recommended.

Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.