Art Life Chooks: Learning to leave the city and love the country

I've left my friends, my career and my whole idea of self, for what? To live some half-baked hippy idyll? I'm going to be living in close proximity to the family I've barely seen since leaving home some thirty years ago, not to mention living with Geoffrey's family at very close quarters. What was I thinking? As a literary agent, Annette Hughes lived a life of launch parties, deal-making and endless manuscripts. It was a job that seemed to follow naturally from her work with painters, sculptors, actors and musicians. But then she gave it all up and headed back to the state of her birth, Queensland, and a farm in the Noosa hinterland with her partner, Geoffrey. Now her life is digging the vegetable patch, watching the seasons, tending the chooks and animating a class of disinclined drama students at a local school. Some days she loses her voice. On others she may speak to no one or simply spend an hour or two communing with the cows or watching horrified as Geoffrey fights off pythons in the chook house. This is an engaging, fresh, opinionated, funny and surprising book about moving out of your comfort zone. 'To me Hughesy is the absolutely fabulous super agent I drank with in the swishest bars in the greatest city in the whole wide world. But that is not Hughesy as you know her. You know her better than I because you know her now as the chicken lady of the northern coast.' John Birmingham 'An absorbing read ... the subject matter and the writing are equally charming.' Australian Bookseller and Publisher