'It’s 1976, and in the small town of Repentance, on the edge of the Great Dividing Range in New South Wales, the new hippies and the old families are about to collide over the issue of logging old-growth forests. Repentance, Alison Gibbs’s debut novel, takes as its focus a few key characters, and the larger drama of the township unravels around the ins and outs of their lives towards a fittingly moving denouement.' (Introduction)