AustLit

'Kingsley (Cat) Fisher is an Australian woman, born at the beginning of the 20th century, with a madness for literature. When she is injured in a terrible accident while reading, Cat finds that her powers as a reader are almost supernaturally enhanced. Over the next hundred years, her life is entwined with the lives and legends of the greatest writers of the time – James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, Kerouac, Sylvia Plath, Patrick White and a host of others. Cat is their secret confidante, first reader and muse; the hidden constant in their very different literary quests. And for one of them she becomes much more, when a question is asked which only Cat can answer. Cat’s adventures take her around the world and back again in an epic tale of imagination, eccentricity and Promethean struggle.' (Publication summary)

'Pat and Ruth Beckett have retired from Sydney to the sublime landscape of the far south coast. To their garden, to their books, to their island in the lake.

'They want no part of the madness of Harbourside Grammar, monstrous celebrity billionaire Buckets Barrington, or the sinister Magnareach Corporation.