'The boys from back home stand beside the bed, watching her bleed onto the white sheet. 'He only said to scare her,' one of them says.
'Sidney is happily married to her firefighter husband and thinking about having a child, but her life has been marred by psychotic breakdowns. Haunted by memories of Dean Cola - the teenage crush who is an essential piece of the puzzle that is her past - she returns to the town where she grew up. Something unthinkable happened there, but is she strong enough to face it?
'A compelling portrait of mental illness, memory, and the ways that the years when we 'come of age' can be twisted into trauma.' (Publication summary)
Epigraph : 'We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not.' - Heraclitus
'Three recent novels by Australian women deal with current and increasingly urgent political questions about female identity and embodiment. They each use the conventions of popular realist fiction to provoke thought about the causes of female disempowerment and the struggle for self-determination. Coincidentally, they are also set, or partially set, in Australian country towns, although their locations are markedly different, and their plots culminate in the revelation of disturbing secrets.' (Introduction)
'Three recent novels by Australian women deal with current and increasingly urgent political questions about female identity and embodiment. They each use the conventions of popular realist fiction to provoke thought about the causes of female disempowerment and the struggle for self-determination. Coincidentally, they are also set, or partially set, in Australian country towns, although their locations are markedly different, and their plots culminate in the revelation of disturbing secrets.' (Introduction)
