AustLit

'In the summer that she turns seventeen Grace comes to the threshold of a world full of richness and danger, love and loss, innocence and exploitation. That summer Grace spends a lot of time dreaming, watched by her mother, the once beautiful Mara, who has become an acid-tongued, dissolute drunkard, and Porora, the fierce Rarotongan matriarch who runs the Paradise Bar where Grace works.

'Set on a beautiful Pacific Island, Nights with Grace is about first love. It is a fresh, sensual and bitter-sweet story, as evocative as a Gauguin painting.(Publication summary))