Digging to Australia
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
She always felt different - and now she knows why.
'An outstanding novel which confirms Glaister's command of the domestic and the bizarre' Independent on Sunday
'Enormously enjoyable' Nick Hornby
Jennifer is about to turn thirteen and is suffering more than the usual teenage confusion. She's lonely and her parents are unfashionably strange, so she lives in her imagination, dreaming of acceptance, to be popular and normal.
Then Jennifer learns that her supposed parents are really her grandparents, and that her mother deserted her years ago. So when Bronwyn, the new girl at school, and the sinister Johnny crash into her life, adventures with them - no matter how dangerous - seem immediately more attractive.
'Glaister's rounded gift is to show life as it really is' Independent on Sunday
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dangerous secrets and sinister undertones power this uncommon coming-of-age tale. Writing with authority about adolescent insecurity, British author Glaister ( Honour Thy Father ) invests her theme with dramatic resonance, giving her slightly misfit antiheroine some responsibility for a final tragic event. When introduced, 12-year-old Jennifer is preoccupied with digging a tunnel in the garden of her English hometown. She imagines digging straight through to Australia, and thus escaping the dull life she leads with Mama and Bob. Soon after Jennifer commences this project in distancing, Mama drops a bombshell: Jennifer is not their daughter but their grandchild, born to their since-banished daughter. This announcement increases Jennifer's sense of alienation; she begins spending her free time in an abandoned church with a squatter named Johnny. More intrigued than frightened by Johnny's erratic disposition, Jennifer overlooks his possible role in the disappearances of local girls. But then her fantasies and ostensibly innocent lies take on some real consequences, which she must face. Glaister is a shrewd observer of domestic minutiae as well as emotional nuances. A masterful play of dark foreshadowing, the novel grips the reader's emotions as it moves to a haunting conclusion.
