(spoilers) This book won the 2007 NSW Writer's Centre Best Fiction Award
With this book I was introduced to a new term "family terrorism" which is the state that exists in a marriage prior to domestic violence. Ruth, an young Australian girl, meets a young Italian immigrant Antonio, but initial mutual attraction degenerates into misunderstanding, hurt and rejection. However by this stage Ruth is pregnant and Antonio reluctantly agrees to marry her. Ruth is a warm fun loving girl , but Antonio has a jealous possessive nature. Ruth gradually becomes his slave and looses her sense of fun, and her own identity. It is only when her husband is away and she is alone with her children that she can recapture the essence of the person she once was, the person who lived to create through her drawings. Throughout this book there is a sense of foreboding, that that Ruth will not survive this (the children have all left home by this stage) but Ruth comes to the point where she can no longer stay, and leaves but after a stint away in Sydney with her daughter she also realizes that she is not sure she will be able to cope on her own, and is on her way back to her husband when the book reaches its devastating conclusion. This was a book I wanted to keep reading. I cared about the characters and what happened to them. A sequel is planned that will tell the story of one of the children ( )