Francesca Multimortal – V. C. Peisker
Francesca Multimortal
Francesca’s quest to be her own woman encounters the walls and fences of a man’s world. Five times, young Francesca dies a violent death. In every era, culture and social milieu, and in all her incarnations – from a 17th-century Sicilian midwife to a 21st-century Australian professional – there is a price to pay for valuing her autonomy over a conventional life in a man’s shadow. In each life, Francesca marries and strives to be a good woman, a wife and mother, but it always ends badly: burned at the stake as a witch in Spanish inquisition-dominated 17th-century Sicily; a victim of her husband’s rage in her Amsterdam and Provençal lives; murdered by a stranger on a solitary beach in the late-Victorian Brighton (UK); and shot by a firing squad in Stalin’s 1937 purge of the intelligentsia. Finally, in her sixth life, Francesca reaches her late fifties and her goal of a self-governed life. She is diagnosed with a terminal cancer at the time of Melbourne’s COVID-19 lockdowns. Awaiting her final, natural death, 21st-century Francesca looks back at her previous lives, revealed to her in vivid dreams, and makes sense of them with tough-minded clarity and humour.
About the author
Trained in political science, education, gender studies and sociology, V. C. Peisker started her professional life as a high-school teacher, then worked as a journalist, freelance author and translator, and radio presenter and producer. After arriving in Australia from Croatia in 1995, she spent 24 years as a full-time academic, teaching sociology and research methods at five public universities in Perth, WA and Melbourne. During that time, she produced over a hundred research publications, including several books. Her creative writing includes feature articles in newspapers and magazines, a book of biographical prose Split Lives: Croatian Australian Stories (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2004), a chapter commissioned for Joyful Strains: Making Australia Home (Affirm Press, 2013) and other works. In 2021, Val opted out of full-time academic work and took an honorary position at the University of Melbourne. While still engaged in academic work and publishing, she now devotes most of her time to her first love, creative writing. A keen hiker and nature lover, she has lived in northern Tasmania since 2022. Francesca Multimortal (Ashwood Publishing, 2023) is her first novel. You can find out more about her work at: https://www.fortysouth.com.au/goodbye-gowrie-park https://fawtasnorthwest.blogspot.com/p/val-colic-peisker.html https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/profile/882196-val-colic-peisker