'Sometimes, If I can't get to sleep, I imagine I'm back in the house where I grew up. ('Grew up' is probably a stretch - we lived there for nearly seven years, beginning when I was eight, but it was the longest we'd lived anywhere and when the time finally came, I found it hard to countenance the idea of leaving.) It was an old cottage on a hill in south-east England, and it had creaking floorboards, beamed ceilings and a long, unruly garden. There'd been a death upstairs the year before we moved in - one of the previous owners had had cancer and passed away in the master bedroom, surrounded by his family - but it was a peaceful house, and at well over a hundred years old must have witnessed more than one life reach its end. I like to go back there in my mind's eye, conjuring the slightly crooked hallway, the doors that never neatly fit their frames, the tiny kitchen with its overwhelmingly wheaten spectrum of 1980s browns. Like handwriting on old foolscap, the more specific details have long faded with time, but the feeling remains: that ineffable sense of calm and familiarity that I associate with being home.' (Publication summary)
(Introduction)
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'The tip shop opens at 10 am every Thursday. By 9.50 am there's a line at the gate at least ten people deep. There's the old couple who resell what- ever they find here on Facebook Marketplace; the man who wears thongs year-round, no matter the weather; the retired tradies who know their way through a bucket of screws and a row of rusted tools. Elbow to elbow they wait, each hoping to be the first across the line. Restless thoroughbreds at the starting gate. And there's Dad, tall, standing to one side with his hands in his pockets. Already looking over everyone's heads to see what's in the yard.' (Introduction)
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'Like many professional drifters of my generation, I had moved house often and quickly until my thirties, and home had become quite a melancholy idea. The pandemic placed me on the floor of a valley a few hours from the city. I had always been trying to move, someplace, anyplace, outside of this country's borders, and COVID-19 put a final end to my youth and all my futile efforts to leave forever. As the general lockdown stretched on, I accepted that I now lived with my partner in the spider-webbed farmhouse of his childhood. It was not the big change I had expected, but I hurtled my way further and further into my new country life, and we fell pregnant the following year.' (Introduction)
'My Parents met in '72, married in '73, and bought a house outside the little Mississippi River town of Fort Madison, Iowa. Two acres of land along a dirt road that became a two-lane highway when I was a toddler, our property within an imperceptible curve that drunk drivers seemed to blow off like dust, into our gully or the neighbour's front yard. Fort Madison was an old settlement: an outpost, a fort, a farming town and, progressively, an industry town built on paint and shampoo and pesticides, canned meats, fancy pens and the state maximum-security prison.' (Introduction)
'The New Year has started, which means I can finally unwrap my gift. I start to pack. I kiss my husband (and the two dogs) goodbye and gently remind him not to call unless someone has died. I poke my head inside my son's dark bedroom, remind him that I am going away, and blow a kiss.' (Introduction)
'On the days I rose before Ma did, each footstep on the stair popped the silence like a knuckle cracking. The dusky dining table looked exactly the way it did in my dreams. If I opened the window, I was sure I'd smell an ocean, and if I went outside, I would find streets that changed each time I entered them. But I just sat at the cold table, with its archaeology of receipts flattened under the glass tabletop, and waited for Windows Vista to boot up. I was writing my first novel and I was determined to get it published before I turned sixteen.' (Introduction)
'It was July 2019 when my partner and I arrived in Sydney. Not knowing how much the world was about to change - Covid was soon to be breaking news - we'd embarked on a journey, leaving behind our family and the home we'd made in Cairns over the past ten years.' (Introduction)
'I pass a defunct railway siding, the remnant mound like a sleeping animal. Pull up beside a mallee wattle and text my husband, Patrick, to let him know where I am before I go out of range. In my day pack: water bottle, laptop, headphones complete with mic, fruit. If I get lost out here it won't be easy to find any form of nourishment, and I'm only just learning what plants might quench my thirst.' (Introduction)
