Book Club Special Edition

Join Elleke Boehmer and Gillian Dooley for a special edition of our book club series, as we follow one couple’s love story across the hemispheres.

About this event

What does it take to hold a relationship together when you’re half a world apart? Elleke Boehmer’s new novel, Ice Shock, brings that age-old question into the twenty-first century. Leah and Niall have video calls, instant messages and every modern convenience at their fingertips. And yet the tyranny of distance still finds a way in.

They are a long way from the couples of the age of exploration and empire, who waited months for a letter and years for a return. But the echoes are there, from Matthew and Ann Flinders to Ulysses and Penelope, and love stories that have always had to cross an ocean.

So what keeps Leah and Niall connected and what pulls them apart? Visiting Adelaide from Oxford University, Elleke will explore these questions with Gillian Dooley, along with what their story shares with those who came before.

📚 Copies of Ice Shock will be available to borrow from our Read and Return collection.

👥 Audience: Open to staff and students

📌 Accessibility & dietary requirements: Please use the registration form to let us know of any accessibility requirements, allergies or food intolerances.

Event details

📅 Date: Monday, 30 November

🕛 Time: 3pm – 5pm

📍 Location: Noel Stockdale Room, Central Library (Level 1), Bedford Park

About the speakers

Elleke Boehmer
Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of the Australian Humanities Academy, of the Royal Society of Literature, and of the Royal Historical Society. She is Extraordinary Professor in English at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, and Executive Director of the Oxford Centre for Life Writing. Elleke Boehmer is the author of a wide range of publications—literary history, novels, short stories, biography, and critical essays.

Her monographs include Resistance in Interaction (2002), Migrant Metaphors (1995, 2005), and Indian Arrivals (ESSE prize-winner, 2016), and her novels The Shouting in the Dark, which co-won the Olive Schreiner Prize, and the David Higham short-listed Screens against the Sky. In 2025-26, Elleke published a trio of books about the ‘far southern edge of the world’, including Southern Imagining (Princeton/Wits UP), and her latest novel, Ice Shock.

Gillian Dooley
Gillian Dooley is an Honorary Associate Professor in English Literature at Flinders University and a former Special Collections Librarian and Publishing Support Librarian at Flinders University Library. She completed her PhD in English at Flinders in 2001 and has published several monographs and scholarly editions, as well as more than 100 journal articles and book chapters.

Her research interests include J.M. Coetzee, Iris Murdoch, V.S. Naipaul, Jane Austen, and Matthew Flinders. She was the founding general editor of Transnational Literature and founding co-editor of Writers in Conversation, and has delivered keynote and public lectures internationally.

Gillian’s recent work focuses on music and literature. In 2023 and 2024 she was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, and her latest book, She Played and Sang: Jane Austen and Music, was published by Manchester University Press in 2024.