Jill and her dad are happy enough after her mother dies. Theirs is a simple life in the outback, far from the big city where a coathanger is being built across a sparkling harbour.

Until Jack arrives at their door one evening, and steps inside to find the skinny, wild-looking child sitting with her grim-faced father. It's the start of all Jill's problems.

'Absence makes the heart grow fonder,' threatens Jack, as he marches off to war. And he's right, in a way—but this is no ordinary romance.

Spanning the period from the Depression to the freewheeling '60s, Helen Hodgman's award-winning second book is a masterpiece, a twisted fairytale told with her characteristic dark wit.