Cirrus@Austlit

'A young wife and mother watches a clock that seems forever stuck at three-in-the-afternoon. Her neighbour obsesses over the front lawn, and the women at the local beach chatter about knitting patterns. Her husband didn't come home last night.

'She lives for Tuesdays and Thursdays, when the baby is with Mother-in-law and she can escape to a less humdrum life. Jonathan, man about town, is Tuesday. Ben, a freethinking artist, is Thursday.

'But Jonathan is in serious trouble, and Thursdays are turning sour. Very sour.

'A brilliant, acerbic tale of a crack-up in stultifying suburbia, Blue Skies marked the emergence of a unique voice in Australian fiction.' (Abstract for 2011 publication from Text Publishing website.)

'Jill and her dad are happy enough after her mother dies. Theirs is a simple life in the outback, far from the big city where a coathanger is being built across a sparkling harbour.

'Until Jack arrives at their door one evening, and steps inside to find the skinny, wild-looking child sitting with her grim-faced father. It's the start of all Jill's problems.

'"Absence makes the heart grow fonder," threatens Jack, as he marches off to war. And he's right, in a way—but this is no ordinary romance.

'Spanning the period from the Depression to the freewheeling '60s, Helen Hodgman's award-winning second book is a masterpiece, a twisted fairytale told with her characteristic dark wit.' (From the Penguin website.)