For the second instalment of our summer of Sunday-reading, Griffith Review celebrates Kristina Olsson’s ‘Shell’, an excerpt from her 2018 novel by the same name, and published in Griffith Review 58: Storied Lives – The Novella Project V as part of the 2017 Griffith Review Fellowships.

Set in 1965 against the building of the Sydney Opera House and the early years of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, ‘Shell’ interrogates the persistent notion of Australia as a neutral surface – a country uninscribed, without history or story – and questions how we mediate our view of the world and of ourselves.