Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140385355 ISBN 13: 9780140385359

Publisher: Penguin Australia, 1997

When a stranger enters a family's midst and insists on discovering all of their darkest secrets, the family begins a slow and painful descent into decay and madness. By the author of Wilful Blue.

About the Author:

Sonya Hartnett is the winner of the 2008 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the world's largest award for lifetime achievement in children's and youth literature. Her novels with Candlewick include Thursday's Child, What the Birds See, Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf, The Silver Donkey, The Ghost's Child, and Surrender, a Michael L. Printz Honor Book. She lives in Australia.

From AudioFile:

Alcoholic, abusive Griffin Willow lives with his emotionally distant wife and their five deeply disturbed children on a run-down farm in rural Australia. They run a tourist trailer park that guests never visit twice. Kate Hosking's performance gives this grim story an objective distance that listeners will appreciate. Hosking's sultry voice with its matter-of-fact yet ominous delivery brings an unsentimental pathos to the brutality of everyday living. The Willows's hardscrabble existence includes violence, incest, murder, and madness, each as common as the bloody slaughtering of sheep or the snarling of vicious dogs. Hartnett's bleak portrait of loneliness and survival and Hosking's intelligent narration paint a tragic picture, terrible in its realism. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine