The Fern Tattoo

Ten years after his mother’s death in an accident on the Hume Highway near Canberra, Benedict Waters is contacted by Mrs Darling, who claims to be an old friend of his mother’s. Several years later, he at last agrees to meet her, and she tells him that she has things of his mother’s to pass onto him. Only when Mrs Darling dies a few years later does Benedict uncover, in her possessions, a hidden world of family secrets he knew nothing about. Through his mother’s diaries, he learns of family scandals and crimes that have played out over the course of the previous century, the consequences of which haunt his family still. Meticulously plotted, The Fern Tattoo carefully unveils a story of the inescapable burden of ancestry and family heritage.