One of the Sydney skyscapes I love.

Reading Delia Falconer’s Sydney – well not actually reading it myself – my partner, with some gentle coercion reads it aloud every night while I lie back on the duck down pillows and listen to the way the words fall into the space between us.

Sometimes, not always, but with enough regularity to keep me hooked, Ms Falconer’s words are like chords.

The way she has constructed sentences, her exclamations about Sydney’s streets and her reflections on its history.

There are passages where the words weave a sort of mysterious sensibility, I know the words, almost as if I have heard them before.

But I haven’t. They are new words, her words and she has written them with such beautiful rhythm, I can imagine re-reading the book again when we are finished.

Falconer doesn’t avoid the sleaze and murkiness of the place and is equally comfortable revealing her love of the city she grew up in.

I lie in my comfortable bed with my toes tucked under the crisp sheets and marvel at her writing.

How did she learn to write like that? Did it just flow out of her or has she worked hard, with her red editing pen to find the exact words and perfect sentences to make us fall in love with her city?

Here’s a passage – see if it affects you in the same way.

Sydney is not so much full of ghosts, as absences, It echoes.
In fact its physical presence is so strong, and so moody, that it is often hard for the human side to get a look-in. When it does, it has to compete with all this natural life – with mighty storms and great orange dusks that turn a velvety dark blue – without ancient legends to help. For the language of the Eora that made sense of the place are largely gone, and were ignored from the colony’s beginnings. There is a sense in which Sydney is dogged by hauntedness itself, haunted philosophically; its ghostliness is almost depthless, as if – so quick and thorough has this forgetting been – there is a tremor in the bedrock of reality itself.

Beautiful, beautiful words.