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'“Family,” Helena Trentham asserts early in the Australian writer Emily Bitto’s remarkable first novel, “should be the people you choose to surround yourself with, not the people you happen to be related to.” The wife of an avant-garde painter and the mother of three daughters living in 1930s Melbourne, Helena has therefore constructed a “big, noisy, quicksilver” community of artists, all working and living together in a ramshackle house. But she fails to consider how this seemingly charmed bohemian life is affecting her own children, neglected and nudged to the periphery.' (Introduction)
