Novels

In Plain Sight

In Plain Sight straddles ethnicity, religion, power and poverty in a historical lens told with compassion and frankness.

Kat is on a secret mission to uncover what happened to her mother, an anthropologist, who went missing in Pakistan a decade ago, after having imprinted on young Kat a rose-coloured image of ancient Ghandara. Readers will wonder at the beauty, lament at the brutal lessons, celebrate Kat’s victories of persistence, rile against her misjudgements, and be devastated by her losses.

Kat, a young Australian woman, has arrived in Pakistan in 1999, but her passport is lost. James, an Australian diplomat, is sent to assist. She immediately dislikes his similarities to her father, a former ambassador, whom she blames for her mother’s disappearance and her own abandonment.

Set prior to 9/11, Kat encounters the world of the slums, honour violence, extreme poverty, and the spread of fundamentalism. Her search takes her to the old city of Peshawar on Afghanistan’s border, and the glacial mountain villages of Hunza, interwoven with the politics of the west, and of privilege, in the capital Islamabad.  

Kat’s experiences shake the very foundations of her beliefs, as history marches in a dangerous new direction, with violence on the rise, just as James’s world turns upside down with Kat’s arrival. 

Reviews

It’s been a while since I read a novel cover-to-cover in a single sitting, but once I started, I simply couldn’t put it down.  It spoke to me on so many levels.  The detail of observations about the places, the light and textures. It was so deeply authentic, I felt myself taken back 25 years. So many memories of once-forgotten things.  Like stepping into a time machine.

Pakistan was a beautiful, terrible paradox. All those dualities – the luxury and poverty, the generosity of the host to their guests and the casual barbarism to their own family, the light and the utter darkness, all captured in this stunning work.

There were passages that made my heart simply ache. There were others that just reignited the searing traumas of that time and that place and the helpless rage of the country and the induced crimes onto its own people.

It’s absolutely brilliant. A former Western diplomat, Pakistan 1999

Little Sparrow

Money doesn’t buy good parenting, but it can buy you secrets.

Two lives intertwine in the Deep South, revealing a web of lies and deceit hidden by racism, exploitation, and the struggle to escape the trajectories of life created by position, privilege and power.

Maribelle Lou has grown up on the wrong side of the tracks in New Orleans, in a life with love, music, and rare opportunities, which she works hard to make the most of against all the odds. Giorgina O’Grady’s gilded life in the wealthy Garden District can’t be all good, because by sixteen she runs away, escaping the world behind the wrought iron fleur di lise fence. During the World’s Fair, the space between the French Quarter and the Garden District is transformed, and a new social circle emerges.

But the glitter of the World’s Fair quickly fades. A body in a laneway brings the girls together on a dark winter’s night. They make a promise to each other to never tell a soul.

As the identity of the victim comes to light and the hunt for the killer turns to women of the French Quarter, their secret threatens to blow at any moment and reveal more of Giorgina’s past, and destroy Maribelle’s future.

Will the girls turn on each other? Who will have the moral spine? Will that be enough to survive when the game is not always played fairly?

The Summer of Steve

Summer. Sunshine. Freedom. No Responsibilities. But life isn’t like that for everyone.

Tender in its reveal, and shocking in its truthfulness, the Summer of Steve is the coming-of-age story every teenage girl has experienced, but no one dares speak. In a country town fifteen-year-old Samantha faces lust, infatuation, trust, and betrayal. Until the day she holds Steve’s life in her hands. From then on, everything is different.

But tragedy is inevitable. If only things had been different before that moment.

The Summer of Steve brings two unlikely characters together after a year of tormented teenage angst. Responsible and diligent, smart and hardworking, Sam is sidelined from opportunity after opportunity until one day tragedy strikes, and Steve sees her.

Really sees her.