Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Recently, a woman posted a disturbing experience on Martine Kropkowski’s Facebook group. “They were walking home from the train with headphones in and a man walked up to her and said: ‘Take your headphones out, I could stab you if I wanted to.
’ “Not every person looks at women and thinks, ‘I could stab her’. But every woman is constantly thinking, ‘Am I OK here? Is this guy gonna do something?’ That’s the feeling that I was trying to convey in the book.” Martine Kropkowski reading at a Brisbane Writers Festival event in 2022.
Credit: Instagram Kropkowski, who lives on Brisbane’s northside, is the author of Everywhere We Look , a novel in which three women head to a wintry small town for a weekend getaway. (The fictionalised Marcoy is based on Kilcoy, two hours north-west of Brisbane.) The three friends are reeling after a tragedy.
Melissa is hyper-alert to the potential threats of the men she encounters. Bridie is unsettled by being separated from her baby, while Cassandra is nursing a great deal of anger. They’re trying to relax and reconnect but end up involved in the search for a local teenage girl who has disappeared.
Kropkowski, who wrote the novel as her PhD thesis at the University of Queensland, says she didn’t set out to write about domestic abuse. “I thought I was going to write a book about friendship,” she says. “But when I started writing, it .