Detailed item info | Synopsis | This award-winning Australian novel takes the reader deep into the heart of a construction camp in the highlands of Tasmania. Three-year-old Sonja lives there with her parents until her mother disappears, leaving the child with her alcoholic father. Now, as an adult, Sonja returns to the scene of the painful childhood she has spent years trying to shut out of her memory.
| | Size | | Height: | 8.0 in. | | Width: | 5.5 in. | | Thickness: | 1.2 in. | | Weight: | 16.8 oz. |
| | Publisher's Note | Years after leaving the home where she had grown up with an alcoholic father and a mother who disappeared one day in the middle of a blizzard, Sonja Buloh returns to Tasmania to make peace with her tortured past.
| | Industry reviews | "In his soap-opera plotting and authentic feel for working people, Flanagan owes much to Colleen McCullough. But there's no denying the power in his own wild flights of prose."
Updike
"[A] heart-wrenching and beautifully written novel....This novel is a rare and remarkable achievement. Given its subject matter it could have been as grittily depressing as anything by Zola or Orwell, yet somehow, amid all the relentless squalor, what Orwell called the 'crystal spirit' shines indomitably through. Flanagan blends a strong yet delicate psychological sensibility with the kind of sharp, vivid, original prose more common in good poets. His outcasts really got past my emotional guard."
Green
"[A] strange, as well as strangely compelling, novel, and it will not be to all tastes. Flanagan narrates it with such intensity that there are more than a few moments when one longs for the heat to be turned down, for a dash or two of humor, for a little breathing room. It is also longer than it needs to be. Yet its occasional shortcomings are bearable because its characters develop in interesting, convincing and affecting ways...; and because Flanagan has thoughtful things to say about history and the ordinary people whose lives are so powerfully affected by it."
Yardley
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