Includes index.

In Telltale, Carmel Bird seizes on an enforced isolation to re-read a rich dispensary of books from her past. A rule she sets herself is that she can consult only the books in her house, even if some, such as the much-loved Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey, appear to be stubbornly elusive. Her library is comprehensive, and each book chosen ? or that cannot be refused ? enables an opening, a connection to people, time, place, myth, image, and the experience of a writing life. From her father's bomb shelter to her mother's raspberry jam, from a lost Georgian public library with 'narrow little streets of books' to the memory of crossing by bridge the turbulent waters of the Tamar River, to a revelatory picnic at Tasmania's Cataract Gorge in 1945, this is the most intimate of memoirs.