Description

Frank and Leon are two men from different times, discovering that sometimes all you learn from your parents’ mistakes is how to make different ones of your own.

Frank is trying to escape his troubled past by running away to his family’s beach shack. As he struggles to make friends with his neighbors and their precocious young daughter, Sal, he discovers the community has fresh wounds of its own. A girl is missing, and when Sal too disappears, suspicion falls on Frank.

Decades earlier, Leon tries to hold together his family’s cake shop as their suburban life crumbles in the aftermath of the Korean War. When war breaks out again, Leon must go from sculpting sugar figurines to killing young men as a conscript in the Vietnam War.

Publisher Review

Just sometimes, a book is so complete, so compelling and potent, that you are fearful of breaking its hold. This is one: a novel about (as its title might suggest) devastating damage and the humanity that, almost unfathomably, remains...with awesome skill and whiplash wit, Evie Wyld knits together past and present, with tension building all the time. In Peter Carey and Tim Winton, Australia has produced two if the finest storytellers working today. On this evidence, Wyld can match them both -- Stephanie Cross * Daily Mail * Wyld sympathetically explores the blight of war and violence on three generations of a working-class Australian family -- Gabriel Byng * New Statesman * Wyld's first novel is a remarkable achievement: a potent and compelling exploration of the connections between father and son, and the legacy of violence and repression * bookmunch.wordpress.com/ * Superb first novel -- Kate Saunders * The Times * Wyld has a feel for beauty and for the ugliness of inherited pain * The New Yorker *