This is a quietly powerful book; part memoir, part linked short stories. Lefevre’s own voice is shared with the fictional Lily Brennan, her alter ego, moving forwards and backwards to her own life, allowing the flexibility and relative anonymity of fiction. This makes for delicious reading, as the different forms expand, reflect, and hide each other.

...a beautiful and complex disquisition on pain and loss, Lefevre moving with grace across a wide range of references.

…These scenes are worthy of Patrick White. There are many pleasures in this short, cunningly crafted, deeply felt book, not the least of which is consistently good writing.

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PICK OF THE WEEK, 24 November 2018

Weaving essay and life writing, the tissues of thought and remembrance with the techniques of fiction, this delighted me because it channels the literary spirit of so many writers I admire, while remaining utterly distinctive. Carol Lefevre takes the sort of ruminative "faction" you get in W.G. Sebald and traces the making of a writer, Lily Brennan, from her childhood in a country town in South Australia in the 50s and 60s to the trials and adventures of adult life. It's no surprise that Amy Witting is one of Lefevre's literary heroes, and Lily's voice possesses a steely wit, intellectual curiosity and emotional intelligence fans of Witting's will be struck by. It's a book limned and enriched by feminist thought, probing how women must run rings around literature (and often life) to write themselves into it. 

The Happiness Glass is one-of-a-kind, with its part memoir, part fiction structure. Yet no section of this insightful and heartbreaking book does not resound with a deep truth and the air of greatly-moving accuracy. 

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LeFevre has a distinctive and elegant prose style, characterised by lyricism, poignancy and understatement,  often with an undertone of melancholy that enhances the emotionally raw nature of many of these pieces.  She has a unique ability to write about deeply affecting personal experiences such as grief, loneliness, homesickness, motherhood and parenting without sentimentality or self-pity...It’s compelling reading, honest, engaging, and an example of how a brave leap across the genre divide can be fruitfully accomplished. 

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FIVE STARS. A beautiful meditative memoir on a life full of dreams and longing, some of them fulfilled, some of them not. So honest it burns.

RIVETING READS FOR THE SUMMER HOLIDAYS 20th December 2018

With seamless skill, Lefevre blurs boundaries between memoir and fiction. Her poetic prose is infused with melancholic beauty, and she writes of home, of belonging and of memories lost — and of what it is to be a woman in a patriarchal world. Her heartbreaking account of infertility and adoption will stay with you long after you turn the final page. View here.