THE BURIED LIFE (Transit Lounge 2025) by Andrea Goldsmith is a literary work of poetic beauty, brilliant craft, meaningful themes and characters with whom we become deeply invested.
The novel features three main protagonists who form an unlikely but inseparable connection. Laura is a successful and smart town planner who has an apparently perfect marriage, although as the story progresses, we begin to glimpse cracks which gradually widen until they threaten to engulf her. The examination of her relationship with her husband is immersive, intellectual, provocative, thought-provoking and detailed. Laura’s interior monologue expands as the narrative progresses, and we are privy to a plethora of criticisms, justifications, excuses, bargaining, habits and preconceived notions become fact that typify not only her marriage but her own personal ambitions and motivations.
Adrian is an expert on death, a morbid subject that he has focussed on throughout his entire, successful academic career. He writes and thinks about death, its forms and reasons and traditions and consequences, but has never really thought about his own beleaguered childhood trauma and how that might affect his adult notions.
And Kezi is a young, enigmatic, quirky character, a passionate artist who creates beautiful handmade paper. Her fundamentalist family and community have rejected her and she struggles to forge a way forward while trying to make sense of her past.
These three very different people are thrown together by circumstance, to find that not only are they compatible, but they are drawn together by common desires, needs and dreams, until they exist as an almost perfect circle of three, each necessary for the other. This is nowhere more obvious than towards the end of the novel, when each is forced to make serious choices as they face difficult challenges to their health, their work, their relationships and their families.
This lovely, contemporary story includes music, art and words as expressions of each individual’s need to fulfil their ambitions. As the characters become more known to us, they each reveal desires, secrets, childhood memories and dreams that add to the complexity and nuance of their situations.
Goldsmith effortlessly merges banal, day-to-day activities with higher concerns of the mind and intellectual pursuits, seamlessly combining both to create rich and layered lives for Laura, Adrian and Kezi. Very much set in Melbourne, readers who enjoy a deep dive into the interiority and motivations of characters set in a familiar location will enjoy the intellectual acrobatics and tender personal interactions depicted in THE BURIED LIFE.