Cirrus@Austlit

'On her twin daughters’ twenty-first birthday, Joy Moody – proprietor of Bayside’s premier laundromat – is found dead. Yet that is not the strangest thing happening behind the bright pink facade of Joyful Suds.

'For much of their lives, Joy has been telling Cassie and Andie one big, fat lie: that they are from the future, and that when they turn twenty-one they will travel back to the year 2050.

'What started as a colourful tale to explain how the girls came to live with her has now become a decades-long deception.

'Worse still, Joy has started to believe it herself.

'The big lie is certainly preferable to the truth she just can’t face – about what happened to the girls’ real mother, Britney, and how far Joy's gone to keep them 'safe' . . .

'With the twins’ twenty-first birthday fast approaching, and with Andie starting to have doubts - particularly when she discovers her ‘future’ is eerily similar to one of her mother's favourite books – time is fast running out for Joy Moody.' (Publication summary)

'Lenny Marks is good at not remembering.

She has spent the last twenty years not thinking about the day her mother left her when she was still a child. Her stepfather’s parting words, however, remain annoyingly unforgettable: 'You did this.'ow thirty-seven, Lenny prefers contentment and order over the unreliability of happiness and the messiness of relationships. She fills her days teaching at the local primary school, and her nights playing Scrabble with her pretend housemate, watching reruns of Friends and rearranging her thirty-six copies of The Hobbit.

'Recently though, if only to appease her beloved foster-mum, Lenny has set herself the goal of ‘getting a life’.

'Then, out of the blue, a letter arrives from the Adult Parole Board. And when her desperate attempts to ignore it fail, Lenny starts to unravel.' (Publication summary)