Knife sharp perception … fiction that is an absolute pleasure to read,’ Emily Maguire, author
This vivid, engrossing, beautifully crafted family drama from an exciting debut author charts the hurtful messes, complicated relationships and profound loves of three siblings.
After their grandfather’s death, siblings Helen, Sylvie and Brendan, and Helen’s daughter, film student Tig, are gathered together at Iluka, a typical fibro beach house in a small town on the south coast. Iluka is the house they grew up in when their troubled mother ran away to the bright lights of the city, leaving their grandparents to raise them.
As they slowly clear the house for sale and relive various memories, they find a bundle of letters addressed to each of them from their missing mother, Marguerite, that were sent long after they’d been told she died.
Their world shifts on its axis, as the siblings begin to question everything they have been told. Why did their grandmother hide these letters? Was their grandfather complicit? And could the mother they thought they had lost still be alive?
Viewed through the unsparing eye of Tig’s camera, we watch a family first implode then reform around a new reality, a reality that brings with it profound change in the way they view themselves and each other.
THIS IS AN UNEDITED SAMPLE
Helen heaved her bag up each step, hoping the timber wouldn’t break beneath her weight. The front door was dimpled glass, backed inside by a curtain of thin floral fabric her grandmother Iris had strung across plastic wires. It was heavy and stuck hard after weeks of salt spray and neglect. When it was finally open, the air inside was hot.
‘Weird, but somehow it still smells like her, like powdery peaches.’ Helen turned in the hallway as her daughter, Tegan, came up the steps behind her.
‘Who? Grandma Iris?’
Helen murmured agreement and peered into the small bedroom then into the sitting room at the front of the house. Tegan held up her phone over her mother’s shoulder, filming each room.
‘How long ago did she die?’
‘Five years.’ Helen felt hollowed out being here again. She willed her stomach to settle. She should have been prepared for this. Iris was like a mother to her. They were raised here, really.
‘I haven’t been since then. Did you see Paddy though? Before—’ Tegan said.
‘I tried once or twice. I think Sylvie used to call him. Bren even came to stay once, but after Iris died Paddy was, well … you know how he was.’
Helen left her bag at the door and moved down the hall, standing for a few moments in each room, trying to calculate the best way to empty it all out. She felt Tegan follow behind with her phone camera on, though she lost interest as Helen began stripping and changing the beds, muttering about the state of the laundry.
*****
They’d left late and the drive from Nowra had taken longer than expected – she’d overslept after a restless night, then had to wait for Tegan to finish filling her thermos with an elaborately prepared coffee. They didn’t get on the road until eleven, but she was still the first to arrive. Her brother and sister would be travelling down from Sydney. She had fretted that her sister, Sylvie, would already be there, waiting for them, since Helen had the only key. Iluka had been locked up for over two months, since Paddy had passed.
Tegan had started filming as they came down the drive. Iluka was on a battle-axe block, so before you saw the house, you had to drive down an extra length of road, a track really – two lanes of compressed dirt with a hump of browned grass in between. The house was at the back of a triangle-shaped clearing. The front yard was dry, patchy lawn surrounded by scrubby grevilleas and coastal rosemary. The cottage itself had been pushed as close to the shore as possible, its small stilts making it look like it was peering over the bush to the sea. Though the trees would have been much lower when Paddy had first built the house.
Helen watched Tegan veer toward the gap in the bushes that led to the beach, moving over the sandy dirt and through the trees to get the shot that Helen, standing at the window, could clearly see in her mind. The scrub was thin, opening after a few steps to the small beach. It was an inlet, really, capped by a narrow golden curve, much less grand than the long stretch of sand around the next headland on Main Beach. Flanked by rocks, plagued by tricky-to-navigate currents, it was always theirs, just for locals. From the shoreline you could look back and see Iluka, the paned windows of the enclosed verandah facing the sea, her roofline just visible from lower down on the beach.
They both turned at the sound of an engine coming down the drive. Helen moved fast – she retraced her steps and pushed her suitcase onto the double bed in the largest room at the end of the hall, the only bedroom facing the ocean.
She could see her sister’s outline through the door. Sylvie jogged lightly up the front steps as Helen pulled the door open. She held her daypack over one arm and used her middle finger and thumb to sweep soft threads of escaping hair off her face. She had short hair that she tied back every morning to make the tiniest spiky little ponytail on the back of her head. To Helen’s knowledge, Sylvie had not changed her hair in twenty years.
‘Hello, sister dear.’
‘Syl.’ Helen moved to embrace her but Sylvie stood stiff as a board. At the last moment she raised her hand to pat Helen’s side.
‘Well.’
‘We haven’t been here in a while.’
‘No.’
‘So this is good. Well, not good as such. But you know, to catch up.’ But Helen’s words went unnoticed as Tegan bounded up the steps, for once her phone lowered at her side.
‘Tig!’
‘Aunty Sylvie!’
‘What are you doing here, kid? I wouldn’t have expected you mid-semester.’
Tegan was in her first year of university at UTS, just down the road from the University of Sydney where Sylvie worked as a biologist of some kind. Helen knew they had seen each other a couple of times in Glebe, after Tegan had moved into a share house this year to start her studies.
‘Let me put this away.’ Sylvie moved down the hall, then turned. ‘I see you’ve already claimed Paddy’s room.’ Was that a small smile? Helen felt juvenile, but if they were here for a week she did not want to stay in the childhood room she left twenty years ago. And, anyway, Sylvie would be in the ocean most of the time.
‘I didn’t think he’d mind.’
Sylvie raised her eyebrows and walked to the pale blue room they had shared, the timber floorboards creaking in a familiar way as she passed the bathroom. They seemed to creak even more now that Paddy had removed all Iris’s carpet runners. Sylvie didn’t go in. She paused in the doorway and leaned her bag against the frame.
‘Let’s put the kettle on.’
‘I hope the grumpy old bastard left some tea.’
Sylvie was joking. She had been Paddy’s pet, though Helen thought it must have stung her how closed and inward he had become in his final years.
The kitchen was small, crammed with cream cupboards that were thick with gloss paint and required an extra tug as Sylvie opened one and then the next to assess the situation.
‘This is pretty bad,’ she said. ‘I think he was eating tinned soup every day. There are ten cans in here.’ She held one out. ‘Man Meal. Chunky. Apparently the male of the species need to chew through soup that looks more like dog food.’
‘Well, without Iris I guess he didn’t know what else to do.’ Sylvie looked at her for a beat. ‘Yes. I know. I was hoping to amuse. Anyway, there’s tea. Probably stale but not much else.’ She threw the box down on the bench, filled the plastic kettle and snapped on the switch with a sigh.
Helen could have told Sylvie what was in those cupboards before she opened them. She had come back to Iluka before the funeral and thrown out all the perishables. The blackening bananas he would have bought only that week – he’d always stuffed them in his pockets before morning fishing trips. Never wanting to wake Iris when sneaking out at dawn, they were his silent breakfast. An old habit unbroken after her death. Helen herself had moved most of his cans and cartons off the benches, unpacking groceries that were never to be consumed.
‘We’ll have to go to the shops.’ Sylvie was using both hands to pull the handles of the high cupboard doors, the ones where Iris used to keep tea, cereal and biscuits.
‘I’ve already started a list.’ Helen pointed to the benchtop just under the wall phone. An envelope sat next to the usual stubby pencil, sharpened long beyond when most people would have given up. Sylvie read Helen’s items and added her own.
‘How long do you think this will take?’
‘Sorting the house? First we need to talk with Bren about whether we decide to sell or keep it. I mean, estate agents always want it empty, clean and with fresh paint before they list it. Then they fluff about, bringing in their own art and vases.’
‘Art and vases? In Beecham Point? I’m not sure this market gives a shit about art and vases. Bring in a surfboard rack and a bucket bong and we’ll sell on day one.’
‘Sylvie.’
‘What? It’s true. Or it will be sold to some arsehole who will knock it down and build a glass-front Airbnb.’
‘You couldn’t knock down Iluka.’ The idea had never even crossed Helen’s mind. She felt foolish. ‘It’s, it’s too—’
‘It is kind of falling apart, Mum.’ Tegan pointed out the window to the guttering on the beach side, which was hanging low, bent and twisted off one end of the verandah roof.
‘None of that is irreparable. Well then, maybe we should keep it as an Airbnb?’ Helen mused. The three of them – herself, her sister Sylvie and their little brother Brendan – could have an income, maybe use it for their own holidays.
‘A family business? I’m sure Nicole would love that idea.’ Nicole was their brother’s new wife. Brendan was her second husband and she had two girls from her first marriage. She had owned several properties with her ex-husband – she was a fan of diversified income streams. Helen knew people just like Nicole and she had felt she had her measure quite quickly. It was, in fact, one safe topic for her and Sylvie, their mutual distaste for their new sister-in-law.
Sylvie brushed the dust from an assortment of mugs and dumped a teabag in the bottom of each. Maddeningly, she didn’t extend the string or tag, just left them all bundled up and poured boiling water over the whole lot. Helen wondered why she had to live every part of her life as though she were camping or on a science field trip. It was irritating, but Helen knew how she would look to Tegan if she commented.
The sunroom was an enclosed section of verandah, the bottom half fibro to the height of the old railings, and then a row of paned windows on top. Their white frames were peeling to grey on the outside, but inside the paint was still almost glossy – except for the very last section, which Iris would leave cracked open in all weather so she could hear the sea. Helen opened it now.
‘Mum was telling me on the way here that you guys used to sneak in through these windows?’
‘It’s almost impossible to sneak at all in this creaky old place.’ Helen sunk into the cushions of the cane lounger, cradling her mug over her knees. ‘But I tried, briefly. Sylvie more frequently. Uncle Brendan probably didn’t have to.’
Sylvie moved in front of her, squinting out the salt-covered window.
‘Grandma Iris was a strange mix. She worried what everyone else thought, but rarely got angry at us. She probably just didn’t want us to bolt like Marguerite did.’
‘So,’ Tegan glanced at her mother, then asked, ‘is this where Marguerite grew up too?’ They rarely mentioned her at home.
Sylvie turned to Helen, who didn’t answer. Marguerite was Paddy and Iris’s only daughter, and their mother.
‘Yes. Until she was seventeen. Same as all of us, really, when you look at it.’
‘But we were only here permanently from about 1992?’ Helen said.
‘1991. I was eight.’
They caught each other’s eye briefly and looked away.
‘I was nine.’
‘That must have been so hard.’ Tegan was watching Sylvie.
Had Helen really never talked about this with her before?
‘I didn’t want to leave Sydney or start a new school,’ Sylvie said.
‘I couldn’t wait to start a new school,’ Helen said. She could remember that sense of possibility. A new start in a new school where no one knew about their embarrassing mother, turning up forty-five minutes late, laughing loudly in her billowing hippie blouses and denim short shorts that showed too much of her skinny, bruised thighs. They barely ever made it on time or with a packed lunch and never both. A social worker had been assigned to them and the school sometimes called her instead of their mother. Those days Marguerite wasn’t laughing.
‘But wasn’t it strange without your mum?’ Tegan asked. ‘It was a relief.’
‘She was pretty bad by that stage,’ Sylvie agreed.
‘She was a mess. She should never have had children.’
‘I don’t think it was intentional. The woman just liked to compound her own grief.’
Helen bit down hard on her back teeth. By seventeen, their mother had dropped out of school, moved to Sydney, left Iluka and her parents far behind, and then almost immediately fallen pregnant with Helen. And then somehow that firstborn daughter, normally so steadfast, grew up and fell pregnant herself at eighteen. With Tegan. Helen was sensitive to any suggestion that made Tegan feel like she was a mistake.
‘I think I’m going to go for a swim before we go into town.’ Sylvie, oblivious, went into the hall.
Helen moved to sit next to her daughter.
‘Well, this is fun already.’ But Tegan ignored her. ‘Can you hear me?’ she said too sharply, then winced.
Tegan’s hearing was one of the things Helen felt most guilty about as a mother (and the list was long). It had taken longer than she would like to admit to realise there was a problem. Her pre-school teacher spoke of her daughter as dreamy, always off in her own world. Like it was a magical, creative state. An introvert. A loner. It wasn’t until Tegan struggled her way through most of primary school that this same behaviour wasn’t spoken of quite so kindly. It had been resolved before she became a teenager, but Tegan’s mannerisms and personality all still seemed so inward-facing. Helen fretted that she’d damaged her child.
She put an arm around Tegan’s shoulder. It could have been her imagination, but it felt like she was allowed to hold her for just a moment longer than usual.
‘I love you, kiddo.’ But Tegan made no sign that she had heard as she unlocked the screen on her phone and started replaying her morning’s work.
The brilliant 2026 debut for readers of Emily Maguire, Charlotte Wood and Anne Tyler