Summary
Sam Kane is an academic psychologist, his life and work expressing the capabilities of his mind. Sam’s wife Rachel is a veteran athlete who has celebrated the prowess of her body in sports played at the highest levels. They’re an odd couple, with differing abilities, passions and world views, yet happy together and still very much in love.
Different challenges prompt them to finish their careers and settle into lives characterised by declining health, loss, dependence and uncertainty. Ever defiant, Rachel attempts to rebuild her sense of self-worth and her faith in God, and to atone for her self-centred and imperfect life. Sam is forced down a path of increasing isolation and despair, towards a final act of great scholarship through which he tries to recover his faith in love.
Sam and Rachel are surrounded by family and close friends who are likewise tested by careers, relationships, temptations and tragedies. They are confronted by ideas that inspire them, memories that terrify them, secrets that suffocate them, and choices that shape them.
Set in Australia from early 1993 through to late 2004, the story is linked closely to three primary locations: Sam’s family home in rural New England, just outside of Armidale, the laconic city and southern beaches of modern Newcastle, and the inner tracts of Sydney.
In Body, In Mind is a philosophical novel thirty years in the making which explores the contrasts that colour the Australian landscape: blackness and whiteness, city and country, joy and despair, knowledge and faith, being and becoming, selfishness and sacrifice, fear and grace, body and mind. It challenges us to be aware of our choices, and to accept responsibility for the self we become. It encourages us all to use wisely the time we have left, to choose what we must remember, what we should forget, who we could forgive, for what we must make amends, and eventually, how we might say goodbye.
David Payne –
What a delight it was to read Fookes’ first book, In Body, In Mind. He developed a raft of characters who were of immediate interest, living in locations that Fookes described graphically and beautifully. The plot developed quickly and gained my interest to the extent that I finished the book within a couple of days and was left wanting more – that is not to say that he failed to finish the story itself (as was an issue with reading Bryce Courtney novels), but rather he left me wanting to see how life for his characters developed. Beautifully written – a delight to read. And now for his second novel …