All
eleven-year-old Tanya Randall wants is a happy family. But Mum does nothing besides
housework, Dad’s always down the pub and Nanna Purvis moans at everyone except
her dog. Then Shelley arrives –– the miracle baby who
fuses the Randall family in love for their little gumnut blossom.
Tanya’s
life gets even better when she meets an uncle she didn’t know she had. He tells
her she’s beautiful and could be a model. Her family refuses to talk about him.
But that’s okay, it’s their little secret.
Then
one blistering summer day tragedy strikes, and the surrounding mystery and
suspicion tear apart this fragile family web.
Priced at only 99c/p on Amazon until Christmas!
Paperback to be released in January.
Extract: The Silent Kookaburra...
2016
Knuckles blanch, distend as my hand
curves around the yellowed newspaper pages and my gaze hooks onto the
headlines.
HAPPY
AUSTRALIA DAY. January 26th, 1973. 165-year anniversary of convict ships arriving
in Sydney.
Happy? What a cruel joke for that summer.
The bleakest, most grievous, of my life.
I can’t believe my grandmother kept such a
reminder of the tragedy which flayed the core of our lives; of that harrowing
time my cursed memory refuses to entirely banish.
Shaky hands disturb dust motes, billowing
as I place the heat-brittled newspaper back into Nanna Purvis’s box.
I try not to look at the headline but my
gaze keeps flickering back, bold letters more callous as I remember all I’d
yearned for back then, at eleven years old, was the simplest of things: a happy
family. How elusive that happiness had proved.
I won’t think about it anymore. I mustn’t,
can’t! But as much as I wrench away my mind, it strains back to my childhood.
Of course fragments of those years have
always been clear, though much of my past is an uncharted desert –– vast, arid,
untamed.
Psychology studies taught me this is how
the memory magician works: vivid recall of unimportant details while the
consequential parts –– those protective breaches of conscious recollection ––
are mined with filmy chasms.
I swipe the sweat from my brow, push the
window further open.
Outside, the sun rising over the Pacific
Ocean is still a pale glow but already it has baked the ground a crusty brown.
Shelley’s gum tree is alive with cackling kookaburras, rainbow lorikeets
shrieking and swinging like crazy acrobats, eucalyptus leaves twisted edge-on
to avoid the withering rays.
But back in my childhood bedroom, behind
Gumtree Cottage’s convict-built walls, the air is even hotter, and foetid with
weeks of closure following my parents’ deaths.
Disheartened by the stack of cardboard boxes
still to sift through, uneasy about what other memories their contents might
unearth, I rest back on a jumble of moth-frayed cushions.
I close my eyes to try and escape the
torment, but there is no reprieve. And, along with my grandmother’s newspaper
clipping, I swear I hear, in the rise and dump of its swell, the sea pulling me
back to that blistering summer of over forty years ago.
To celebrate the release of The Silent Kookaburra, the first novel in French historical The Bone Angel trilogy - Spirit of Lost Angels - is also on sale for only 99c/p until Christmas at all e-retailers:
