Cirrus@Austlit

'Flyaway is a strange beast of a book. It’s a Gothic fairytale set ostensibly somewhere between the Coral Sea and the Indian Ocean, in a bush district, but Kathleen Jennings’ debut novel could really be located in just about any small Australian town, in any dusty outpost where memory “seeped and frayed … where ghosts stood silent by fenceposts”. Bettina Scott is the unreliable narrator at its core, a young woman who, unlike her mother, is graceless and unlovely; there are intimations that tempestuousness and insolence also reside closely beneath her surface.' (Introduction)