Cath Cunningham’s debut novel has landed, and readers aren’t quite sure what hit them.
Twenty years ago, Cath Cunningham was handed a cigarette lighter. It had a Darwin hotel’s name on it, passed along by a friend who had pocketed it at a party and never looked back. Simple enough. Except Cath couldn’t stop thinking about it.
How does a lighter end up travelling from Darwin to Melbourne? How many people had held it? What rooms had it been in? What moments had it witnessed, completely unnoticed?
She sat with those questions for two decades. Then she wrote a book.
So What’s It Actually About?
My Life As A Cigarette Lighter follows a blue Bic lighter from the moment it sparks to life in a factory to its very last flame. The lighter has one goal in mind: to light cigarettes. It never gets there. Not once.
What it does instead is somehow end up inside the Sistine Chapel during a papal election. The journey there involves a drug dealer’s shop, a train seat gap, a police evidence bag, a wheelie bin, and a rubbish tip. Among other things.
It sounds absurd written like that. Reading it, though, it just feels true.
The People Make It
Cath doesn’t just give us a travelling lighter. She gives us a window into the lives it brushes up against, and those lives are written with a lot of heart.
Tommy is twelve, angry in ways he can’t explain, doing things he knows are wrong because belonging somewhere feels better than being lost. His mum cleans trains at night and holds five kids together on almost nothing. A priest carries a secret that would unravel everything people think they know about him.
These aren’t background characters. They’re real, flawed, recognisable people. The kind you think about after you’ve closed the book.
Worth Your Time?
If you want something original, something that doesn’t read like everything else on the shelf right now, this is a good pick. It’s short enough to finish in a sitting but the kind of thing that lingers a bit longer than you’d expect.
My Life As A Cigarette Lighter is available now. Go grab a copy.