Book description
What happens when an obsession takes over and there is no one to hold
you back? Longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. Thea Farmer, a
reclusive and difficult retired school principal, lives in isolation
with her dog in the Blue Mountains. Her distinguished career ended under
a cloud over a decade earlier, following a scandal involving a much
younger male teacher. After losing her savings in the financial crash,
she is forced to sell the dream house she had built for her old age and
live on in her dilapidated cottage opposite. Initially resentful and
hostile towards Frank and Ellice, the young couple who buy the new
house, Thea develops a flirtatious friendship with Frank, and then a
grudging affinity with his twelve-year-old niece, Kim, who lives with
them. Although she has never much liked children, Thea discovers a
gradual and wholly unexpected bond with the half-Vietnamese Kim, a
solitary, bookish child from a troubled background. Her growing sympathy
with Kim propels Thea into a psychological minefield. Finding Frank's
behaviour increasingly irresponsible, she becomes convinced that all is
not well in the house. Unsettling suspicions, which may or may not be
irrational, begin to dominate her life, and build towards a catastrophic
climax. Virginia Duigan wrote the screenplay of the 1998 movie The
Leading Man, starring Jon Bon Jovi, Thandie Newton and Barry Humphries.
Before becoming a novelist, Duigan worked as a journalist, broadcaster,
editor and TV scriptwriter. She was a regular feature writer on The
National Times, and contributed documentaries to ABC radio. She was a
freelance contributor to The Bulletin, The Age, The Australian, The
Financial Review, Cinema Papers, and in London to the The Observer and
The Times. She was Literary Editor of The National Times, and a theatre,
book, film and restaurant reviewer. Duigan has written three novels, The
Precipice, Days Like These and The Biographer.
