A composer in her sixties sits at her piano - her lifelong thinking place - and decides, finally, to talk to her dead mother.
She has spent her life watching: watching her mother's huge dark eyes track something invisible across the room; watching beauty calcify into terror, then sudden violence without warning or explanation. She never took the chance to ask why. Now, with nothing left to lose, she will.
The Girl Who Climbed on Rooves moves across a life in four musical movements, interweaving ninety-nine numbered memories addressed directly to the mother with a narrative that counts down, from its opening pages, toward a single moment: the rifle. The novel assembles its portrait of a woman - and a family - the way a composer assembles a score: fragment by fragment, each piece incomplete until the whole finally sounds.
At the heart of the novel is a secret shared by hundreds of thousands of Australian families. Between 1920 and the mid-twentieth century, approximately 250,000 children - most not orphans at all - were placed in church-run institutions by struggling parents who trusted their children would be cared for. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, which tabled its findings in 2017, revealed decades of systematic abuse. Most victims went to their graves without telling a word. Especially the women.
The narrator's mother was one of them.
What the narrator remembers, above all, is a single glimpsed image: a girl in Edwardian North Sydney, skirts crammed into her bloomers, scrambling hand over hand along the rooftops of her street - wild, mischievous, entirely free. Somewhere between that girl and the woman who raised her, something was broken. This novel is the search for what, and why, and whether understanding it can be enough.
The Girl Who Climbed on Rooves is a novel about music as a way of knowing, about the silences families keep across generations, and about what fiction can carry that real life - and real memory - cannot. It is Sue Woolfe's most ambitious and most personal work.
The Girl Who Climbed on Rooves is a novel about music as a way of knowing, about the silences families keep across generations, and about what fiction can carry that real life - and real memory - cannot. Eight years in the making, it is Sue Woolfe's most ambitious and most personal work.
Sue Woolfe is an Australian novelist, short-story writer and essayist whose work has been published internationally and recognised with major literary awards.She is the author of six novels, including Painted Woman, runner-up for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and Leaning Towards Infinity, winner of the Christina Stead Prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the region. Her novel The Oldest Song in the World was informed by the eighteen months she lived in a remote Northern Territory Aboriginal community. Her short-story collection Do You Love Me or What? was runner-up for the NSW Women Writers' Prize.She has adapted several works for the professional stage in Australia and New York, for ABC Radio, and as a libretto for an opera currently in development. Her non-fiction includes Making Stories (with Kate Grenville) and The Mystery of the Cleaning Lady, which explores creativity through neuroscience. She continues to publish research on the brain and creativity, most recently with Routledge in 2024, and hosts a long-running monthly online Creativity Bar for creatives across disciplines.
