$23.95 (Paperback book / Allen & Unwin / ISBN:9781741756043)
The Children
You bring your children up to escape sorrow. You spend your
best years trying to stop them witnessing it on television, in you,
in your neighbours' faces. Then you realise, slowly, that there is
no escape, that they must steer their own way through life's
cruelties.
In The Children Charlotte Wood, one of Australian fiction's
rising stars, delivers a short, sharp shock of a novel that takes
you into the heart of a family as normal, and as broken, as any
other.
When their father is critically injured, foreign correspondent
Mandy and her siblings return home, bringing with them the remnants
and patterns of childhood. Mandy has lived away from the country
for many years. Her head is filled with images of terror and war,
and her homecoming to the quiet country town - not to mention her
family and marriage - only heightens her disconnection from
ordinary life. Cathy, her younger sister, has stayed in regular
contact with her parents, trying also to keep tabs on her brother
Stephen who, for reasons nobody understands, has held himself apart
from the family for years.
In the intensive care unit the children sit, trapped between their
bewildered mother and one another; between old wounds and
forgiveness, struggling to connect with their emotions, their past
and each other. But as they wait and watch over their father,
there's someone else watching too: a young wardsman, Tony, who's
been waiting for Mandy to come home. As he insinuates himself into
the family, the pressure, and the threat, intensify and build to a
climax of devastating force.
This acutely observed novel exposes the tenacious grip of
childhood, the way siblings seem to grow apart but never do, and
explores the price paid for bearing witness to the suffering of
others - whether far away or uncomfortably close to home. The
Children marks Wood as one of our finest writers.
Charlotte Wood
The Children
$23.95 (Paperback book / Allen & Unwin )
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