Nina Culley reviews Heartsease by Kate Kruimink
Heartsease
Kate Kruimink
ISBN 9781761561955
Reviewed by NINA CULLEY
Some novels announce their ghosts; others let them quietly inhabit the edges. In Heartsease, the second novel by award winner Alice Kruimink, ghosts live on: in muscle memory, in unfinished conversations, in the residue of grief.
Where Kruimink’s debut, A Treacherous Country, explored the weight of colonial history in Tasmania, Heartsease —winner of the 2025 Tasmanian Literary Awards Premier’s Prize for Fiction —is quieter and more fluid. The novel’s title borrows from Viola tricolor, a flower historically used to soothe heartache, famously referenced in a love potion in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s also the flower that Ellen (Nelly) Llewellyn—one of the novel’s narrators—is unknowingly given by her mother. The naming becomes emblematic of Kruimink’s central preoccupation: the gaps in memory, and how misrecognition can shape, strain, and sometimes redeem our most intimate relationships.
Set in present-day Hobart, Heartsease opens with Nelly—thirty-two, adrift, partial to Fruity Lexia and assisting her friend Josh with his artistic visions — on her way to a silent retreat in rural Tasmania. The trip, long-postponed, has been arranged with her older sister Charlotte (Lot), an employment lawyer and mother who has spent much of her adult life quietly caring for Nelly following the early death of their mother, Nina.
The retreat itself is an intriguing opening: Nelly arrives first and surveys the other participants, internally mocking the garish velvet upholstery and plastic apples, and leaving notes for Lot – ‘1. smell after rain ask Lot’; ‘2. Geraniums ask Lot,’ (p11). But the silent retreat, for all its symbolic potential, is soon abandoned once Lot arrives and the pair escape to a nearby pub (Nelly isn’t great at staying sober). It’s a curious narrative decision: Kruimink gives us a vivid setting and a cast of side characters, only to leave them behind.
And yet, I think I understand it. I did a silent retreat in Thailand in 2024, and for weeks afterwards I wrestled with how to translate the experience into something narrative or meaningful. But in hindsight, it wasn’t a story; it was a kind of holding space for interiority – one that doesn’t move the narrative forward but deepens the emotional experience. In Heartsease this remote location becomes a crucial point of departure—not only for Nelly and Lot, but later for Lot and Josh, who take a fractured road trip home, first in separate cars and eventually together, leaving two cars behind. One of these cars is Nelly’s—and by the third chapter, we know why: she has died.
It takes a moment to realise it. The narrative shifts suddenly. One minute you are reading Nelly’s candid first-person voice, the next you are in Lot’s more restrained third-person perspective, assembling fragments. It’s a devastating blow in that you lose not just a character but also a narrator; it’s a special kind of bereavement for readers. And a risky structural move, one that recalls the narrative handover in Ali Smith’s How to Be Both (2014) or the tonal pivot in Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing With Feathers (2015). Like Porter, Kruimink seems less interested in conventional plot than in the messy mechanics of mourning, and the way memory–subjective, recursive, unreliable–becomes its own form of storytelling.
Kruimink observes: ‘We don’t live linearly. I think we live partly in the present and a whole lot in the past, with an undercurrent of future always there.’ (1) This idea echoes what philosopher Henri Bergson called ‘durée’, a continuous, qualitative experience of time that defies the segmented chronology of clocks. Bergson, the son of a composer, believed that listening to music is the perfect model of durée in that it best illuminates time: ‘Duration is the continuous progression of the past, gnawing into the future and swelling up as it advances.’(2) He wrote: ‘Our personality constantly sprouts, grows, and matures. Each of its moments is something new added onto what came before.’(3) Kruimink articulates this not just thematically but formally:
‘Time was beginning to congeal like hot sugar…And although the day had just been a day, full of its measure of twenty-four hours, now as we slid into night those hours had swollen like leeches at the vein and were dragging fatly by. Some forwards, some backwards.’ (p112).
Kruimink conveys the non-linear movement of memory through a layered narrative structure, allowing multiple timelines to emerge: one follows the sisters’ final trip together, another traces Lot’s reckoning in the days after Nelly’s death, and a third drifts between spectral presences—ghosts of the past (or glimpses of the future?) For instance, after leaving the retreat in search of a pub, Nelly has the uncanny sense that Josh has been in her room. Though confused by the feeling, she describes his presence as a ‘kind of new memory’ (p.154). Later, she reflects: The moment feels out of place—until later, after her death, when Josh returns to collect her belongings from her room, retroactively confirming her intuition.
As a teenager, Nelly attended what the novel calls a ‘special support school for troubled teens,’ where she jokes that the only thing she really learned was the Venn diagram. That image becomes a quiet, recurring symbol throughout the novel. The intersection—the slim overlap between two circles—represents the emotional space Nelly shares with those closest to her, particularly Lot, and occasionally Josh. It’s where their connection is strongest: over drinks, in humour, in memory. They often joke that they can read each other’s minds. But when they drift out of that shared centre—especially when their mother, Nina, comes up—the space between them grows. After disagreeing on the notion that nothing matters because ‘the sun’s going to explode in six billion years anyway…’ (p.164) the sisters stand in silence, staring at each other through the speckled mirror of a pub bathroom. Nelly thinks:
‘And the Venn diagram of us split apart again… How could I bridge the galaxies? I don’t know but I had to try,’ (p.164).
Like in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), where familial intimacy is peppered with silence, pain, and failed communication, Heartsease dwells in the ache of proximity—that we can be physically close to someone and still unable to reach them.
Hence the ghosts. From the novel’s first line – ‘I saw my mother for a long time after she died,’ (p1) – Kruimink signals the spectral. But Heartsease isn’t a ghost story in the way of misty graveyards or icy hallways. Its hauntings are ambiguous: are they memory, time loops, energy, or muscle memory? The novel shares tonal and structural DNA with Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House, in which a character also named Nell is haunted by visions of the ‘bent-neck lady,’ only to discover she is seeing herself from the future. Nina haunts Nelly, and later Nelly haunts Lot through anecdote, through the syntax of remembered conversations, through the rituals of her sister’s grief. In one of the most moving scenes, Nina’s ghost slides beneath Nelly’s electric blanket:
Ellen says, ‘…I never really felt like you liked me.’
Nina replies: ‘What a silly thing to say.’ And later: ‘Your eyes remember me… Your ears remember me. Your heart remembers me.’ (p. 92–93)
In this liminal space—between connection and estrangement—distance is most keenly felt. Connection is possible here, but fragile. And more often than not, it’s what remains unsaid that creates the fracture: Lot not telling Nelly she loves her in the bathroom; Josh never revealing to Nelly that he is asexual; Nina and her mother Anna’s fractured relationship.
A central theme of Heartsease is memory’s unreliability, particularly around childhood. Nelly, for instance, is preoccupied with the time she shot her friend, Lily McGrath, with an arrow. She recalls an image of Lily lying ‘plank-like’ in the backseat of a car. And yet, even as she narrates the scene, doubt creeps in:
‘This can’t be a true memory, of course. Surely they would have called an ambulance.’ (p.113).
This slippage between memory and reality is like Sigmund Freud’s concept of ‘screen memories,’ where emotionally charged or traumatic events are overwritten by more banal details, or remembered in displaced, symbolic form. Less threatening childhood memories – like falling leaves in a storm – veil painful ones. Similarly, in Heartsease, Kruimink allows the unreliability of Nelly’s recollection to do more than suggest faulty memory; it becomes a device through which grief, guilt, and trauma persist, unprocessed.
Kruimink also explores memory’s material trace. Nelly is an organ donor; her heart lives on. This literal transference becomes a metaphor for how the world remembers the dead. Later in the novel, Josh reads Lot a sci-fi story he’s created in which the captain of the ship, upon encountering death, sees the hugeness of the light in the spaces between the growing spots of darkness and knows it doesn’t matter at all:
‘The molecules of their bodies will just carry on.’ (p238).
Of course, molecules don’t just carry on, they change. As a reader, you hope the scientific fact offers Lot the same strange comfort it once gave Nelly, widening the small overlap of their Venn diagram. In this way, Heartsease is less concerned with what happened than with how we remember what happened—and how those memories, incomplete and refracted, move us forward.
Heartsease is not so much a novel about death as it is about the enduring complexity of love—between mothers and daughters, between sisters, between the living and the dead. And perhaps more elusively, between reader and character. Like all great novels, Kruimink achieves something wonderful: she keeps her characters—especially Nelly—alive not through molecules, but through voice, memory, and the intimacy of the page.
Citations
1. https://www.theaureview.com/books/author-interview-kate-kruimink-heartsease/
2. Bergson.Creative Evolution(Ch. 1, pgs. 4-6), New York, Camelot. (1911) https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26163/26163-h/26163-h.htm
2.https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/henri-bergson-biography/
NINA CULLEY is a Thai-Welsh writer and critic based in Naarm. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Kill Your Darlings, Liminal, Aniko Press, Mascara Review, and more. As a theatre, arts, and literary critic, her work is regularly published in Time Out, Limelight, and ArtsHub. In 2024, she was named one of Mascara’s Emerging Critics, and she is a 2025 Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow. Nina previously worked as Editorial Assistant at Kill Your Darlings.