Merlinda Carullo Bobis is a Philippine-Australian born on November 25th 1959. Merlinda is a writer and academic, but she is also a dancer and visual artist. Her literary works includes poetry, short stories and some novels， like Summer Was a Fast Train without Terminals, White Turtle and Fish-Hair Woman.

I’m really interested in her book Fish-Hair Woman. It is a complicated story. It’s a war story, murder mystery, political thriller, romance and historical epic. The first thing that it attracts me is the name of the book. The central character is Estrella, the fish-hair woman who has a 12-meters long hair like a net to retrieve the dead from the river. She has an elder sister named Pilar, who is a member of the communist insurgents. The two sisters both loved an Australian journalist Tony. Their relationship is complicated due to the fact that Estrella, whose mother died during labor, is the illegitimate daughter of the most powerful man in the village.

The Fish-Hair woman is a multi-layered story of political unrest, complicated village loyalties and familial and romantic love. It is told in the first-person and third-person points of view. Sometimes we see the story from Estrella’s eyes, and sometimes we see it from an opposing narrator’s eyes. And an interesting thing is that every time Estrella feels painful and suffered from violence, her hair will magically grow.

After I read some chapters of the book I find that the language is easy to understand and the story is pretty good. I will try to read some poems of hers after I have finished reading this novel.