AustLit

'A story of homecoming, this absorbing novel opens with a young, city-based lawyer setting out on her first visit to ancestral country. Candice arrives at "the place where the rivers meet", the camp of the Eualeyai where in 1918 her grandmother Garibooli was abducted. As Garibooli takes up the story of Candice's Aboriginal family, the twentieth century falls away.

Garibooli, renamed Elizabeth, is sent to work as a housemaid, but marriage soon offers escape from the terror of the master's night-time visits.

'Simone Harlowe is young and clever, an Aboriginial lawyer straddling two lives and two cultures while studying at Harvard. Her family life back in Sydney is defined by her complex relationship with her father, Tony, a prominent Aboriginal rights activist.

'As Simone juggles the challenges of a modern woman's life - career, family, friends and relationships - her father is confronting his own uncomfortable truths, as his secret double-life implodes.

'Can Simone accept her father for the man he is and forgive him for the man he's not?' (From the publisher's website.

'A vital Aboriginal perspective on colonial storytelling

'Indigenous lawyer and writer Larissa Behrendt has long been fascinated by the story of Eliza Fraser, who was purportedly captured by the local Butchulla people after she was shipwrecked on their island in 1836. In this deeply personal book, Behrendt uses Eliza’s tale as a starting point to interrogate how Aboriginal people – and indigenous people of other countries – have been portrayed in their colonizers’ stories.