The point of view was always at just a slight distance so that I felt I wasn’t part of the story, just looking on. I never quite got fused with the narrative in this one and it wasn’t the writing, which was excellent. I happen to like stories that I can get into the skin of the characters.

This was a really interesting book in the light of one of my other interests: reading 'inside' or 'outside' the text - being a participant in the story or a viewer of it. So when I realised Gillian Rubinstein is obsessed with labyrinths and mazes in her stories, I had to go out and find a copy of Beyond the Labyrinth to refresh my memory of the details.

It's a major aspect of my own book, God's Poetry. Now I’m always on the lookout for authors whose names have a deep resonance with the themes of their writing. The lightbulb at the back of the brain went on. In the footnotes, I discovered a curious item: in the Middle Ages, labyrinths were called Julians or Gillians. This was Theodore Silverstein’s translation. I re-read this after many years because I’d just got a new (new for me that is) edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and was poring over the trivia in the footnotes. It's well-written and strange, and I'm looking forward to reading another Rubinstein book my fiance brought home from the library. Beyond the Labyrinth is a suspenseful tale of an alien encounter written in the style of sci-fi-realism. Is every YA author in Australia on acid? Is it because they're upside down all the time, living in the southern hemisphere, and all their blood has congealed in their heads? I don't know what they're doing over there, but it's working. At that point I thought, 'Ok, these must just be the two weirdest YA books ever produced by Australian authors, and it must be just a coincidence that they are the only two YA books by Australian authors that I've ever read.' But then I read Beyond the Labyrinth-which was even weirder-and now I don't know what to think. Then things got even stranger when I read The Paradise Trap with its mishmash of. It started with The Museum of Mary Child, with its hairpin-curve plot twists. The Australian young adult novels I cross paths with just get weirder and weirder.

Beyond the labyrinth gillian rubinstein