AustLit

'When Lucy's husband of eighteen years runs out on her, she'll do anything to win him back. Including climbing out of her bedroom window at one in the morning wearing her daughter's mini skirt.

'Jasper has left Lucy for her best friend, the chic and thin interior decorator Renee. To make matters worse, her teenage daughter Tally, blames her Mum. "Dad left because you've let yourself go, you're overweight and you nagged him. No wonder he buggered off."

'While Tally is busy trying to find a loophole in her birth certificate so she can put herself up for adoption, Lucy tries to accept that a child is for life and not just for Christmas. Although a signed-up member of Underachievers Anonymous, in Lucy's quest to win back her husband she learns to be a surf life saver, loses weight and gets a job. She also falls in lust, finding herself torn between an older and a much younger man.But it's not until Lucy makes the Freudian discovery that her toy boy is also dating her daughter - and that he's been paid to do so by her conniving ex as ammunition for a custody battle, that she finally learns to stand on her own two stilettos.' (Publisher's blurb)

'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. Her displacement carries into the lives of her seven children - their stories witness to the impact of orphanage life and the consequences of having a dark skin in post-war Australia. Vividly rekindled, the lives of her family point the direction home for Candice.

Home is a ... novel from an author who understands both the capacity of language to suppress and the restorative potency of stories that bridge past and present.' (Source: Publisher's blurb)