FBi's Canvas

Picture this: the year is 1887. It's early in a small coastal town, and the sky's overcast, the morning eerily silent in the wake of a howling storm that shook the place through the night. Down at the beach shapes start washing onto the shore like whales beaching, slowly at first and then more quickly, until the small beach is covered and crowded with these log-like things - revealed, when looking closely, to be the bloated corpses of shipwreck victims - piles of their bodies lining the shore. That is the terrifying image that opens Glenys Osborne's first novel, Come Inside. And it's in the running for the 2010 Commonwealth Writers Prize. Matt Levinson spoke to Glenys Osborne on Canvas.