Dancing on Coral

Dancing on Coral is a Miles Franklin Award-winning novel by Australian author Glenda Adams.

Synopsis
Lark Watter is desperate to leave behind her life in suburban Sydney in the 1960s. At university she meets an American, Tom Brown, and travels with him across the Pacific by freighter to a new life in the USA.

Critical reception
Marion Halligan, in The Canberra Times referred to the novel as a "fine farce" and noted that the author "seems rather more interested in the episodes than the essentials; or maybe she sees herself as hiding the essentials in order to make her readers work at discovery. But I found that the pleasures of this book were in the multiplicity and complexity of its episodes, pleasures which appeal to the intellect as games and puzzles do. Emotions aren't important, amusement is."

Awards

 * Miles Franklin Literary Award, 1987: winner
 * New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, 1987: winner