The Sands of Marianne, Lucy Wilkinson

Perhaps one of the greatest tragedies of consciousness is that we imagine who another is without actually knowing them… And so, this story attempts to unravel the interior lives of two people who live within their fragile illusions. They endure themselves. Marianne indulges in her solitude and restraint in her semi-detached suburban home. Opposite, lives Paul Andrea, a failed musician who repairs a decaying house, living in numbness and perpetual habit. They intimately observe one another from a distance, and sometimes, very subtly, feel the potential to love one another.

The Sands of Marianne is a moving elegiac soundscape and palimpsest reworking of George Sand’s novel, Marianne (1877) unravelling into poetic Sandstains of a missing woman. It is an enfolding account of the death of the author’s father and breakdown of a relationship that transforms grief into allusive quantum particles that blawn and drib and fall in The Sandstainers. These shapeshifting little buggars, unconditionally love her, retrace her memories, and shadows that move between her feet. The Sandstainers accept the free reforming nature of healing, and allow the sand to move and change shape until it settles, for it to only move again, in fluidity, the Sandstains defy logic and reason, sand between our fingers.

This book is dedicated to those who are or have been on the brink of psychological “collapse”.