WILDFLOWER HILLBY KIMBERLEY FREEMAN, HACHETTE AUSTRALIA, $32.99.
“The worst mistake we can make about old people is to forget they were young once,” says award-winning women’s fiction writer, Kimberley Freeman. And so, in her latest novel, she heads up into the attic and opens up Grandma Beattie’s old memory box to discover a poignant chapter in the maternal family history, about Australian-born London prima ballerina Emma.
This evocatively written story is about a secret pregnancy and forbidden love affairs, set against the backdrop of illegal gambling rooms and bible-bashing households in Glasgow and Hobart, in the ’20s and ’30s. When an accident and a broken love affair leaves Emma with a damaged knee and heart, she returns to Sydney, where she inherits Nana Beattie’s decrepit sheep station in Tasmania. There, she unearths the painful truth of her grandmother’s parallel journey in a different era.
Related stories
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
