'Jemma’s father is Irish-Australian, is young and vain and has few parental instincts. He is addicted to port, the horses, and women.
'Jemma’s mother is emigrant English, is young and naïve and also has few parental instincts. She is addicted to a teenage notion of love and romance.
'Jemma accepts her mother as she is, but in the earlier years she carries a flickering hope her father may yet rise above his addictions, until their stuttering relationship is irrevocably destroyed by his own hand.
'But Jemma is an aimsitheoir – she will find things - safety pins, money, buttons, branches hanging low with fruit, a hollow tree, a scraggy white cat, a frog the colour of mud, a barefoot Irish girl with a basket of kelp. She will also find horror, courage, grief, grit, music, her voice, an excess of laughter, and several versions of God. And wings. ' (Publication summary)
