AustLit

Everybody thinks they know this story. But do they really?

If you took a bird’s-eye view of Mount Barker, you’d see ordinary Australians living on their ordinary suburban blocks in an ordinary regional town. Get closer. Peer through a window. You might see Nathan Long, obsessively recording the incessant bark of a neighbourhood dog, or the Wheeler family sitting down for a meal and trying to come to terms with a shocking discovery. If you listen, you may hear tales of fathers and their wayward sons, of widows who can’t forgive themselves, of children longed for and lost, of thwarted lust and of pure, incorruptible love. Within the shadows is an unspeakable crime.

Rebekah Clarkson has created a compelling, slow-burning portrait of a town in the midst of major change as it makes the painful transformation from rural idyll to aspirational suburbia. What looked like redemption is now profound loss. What seemed spiteful can now be forgiven

(Publication Summary)

''This was what you wanted: to have somewhere you were meant to be.'

'Donna is struggling with change. After moving into a new town, seeing her daughter start school and getting a job with the local drop-in centre, she feels more mixed up and out of place than her five-year-old. Life is complicated. There is the seemingly impenetrable kindy mother’s group, the bottles of Grange her husband keeps receiving from property developers and the erotic dreams she is having about her new boss.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.