AustLit

'Once, Rich and Sandy were environmental activists, part of a world-famous blockade in Tasmania to save the wilderness. Now, twenty-five years later, they have both settled into the uncomfortable compromises of middle age - although they've gone about it in very different ways. About the only thing they have in common these days is their fifteen-year-old daughter, Sophie.

'When the perennially restless Rich decides to take Sophie, whom he hardly knows, on a trek into the Tasmanian wilderness, his overconfidence and her growing disillusion with him set off a chain of events that no one could have predicted. Instead of respect, Rich finds antagonism in his relationship with Sophie; and in the vast landscape he once felt an affinity with, he encounters nothing but disorientation and fear.

'Ultimately, all three characters will learn that if they are to survive, each must traverse not only the secret territories that lie between them but also those within themselves.' (From the publisher's website.)

Set in the small Karnataka town of Kittur, ...Assassinations attempts a portrait of the town and its inhabitants, across class, caste, religion and occupation. Among them are an illiterate Muslim boy who is dazzled by a handsome Islamic terrorist a Dalit bookseller arrested for selling a pirated copy of The Satanic Verses a journalist confronting the yawning gap between what happened during a communal riot and what his newspaper is willing to print and the widow of a farmer who turns in vain to the local Communist leader for help. 'What emerges,' according to the blurb, 'is the moral biography of an Indian town in the seven-year period between the assassinations of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi-a time of great transformations.' (Publisher's blurb)