Sue Orr's short stories are marked by crafted, often crafty, plots and an engaging subversiveness of tone. One of those stories is the genesis of this first novel, a narrative of conflict and concealment in the small Hauraki Plains community of Fenward.
It's the 1970s. Sharemilkers are on the move, as they are most years, looking for work and a decent share of profits. The dairy farmers call it Gypsy Day, when utes are on the move crammed with "sofas, fridges, beds, kids, dogs".
Two such arrivals are rawly-widowed Ian Baxter and highly gorgeous 13-year-old Gabrielle. She and farmer's daughter Nickie begin an intense, ephemeral friendship. They're authentically half-formed young humans: precocious, innocent, devious, idealistic. They still write childish addresses on a birthday card, experiment wildly with lipstick.
Through a farmhouse window, they become inadvertent witnesses to savagery. When they try to report it, they jolt against an adult world which believes that what goes on in other people's homes is nobody else's business.
Incomprehension and denial bring building tension. The long, burning summer swells. You wait for something to break wide open, which it duly does, with revelations, feeding eels, subterranean and symbolic peat fire, plus a rather pendulous coda.
