THE CHILDREN

You bring your children up to escape sorrow. You spend your best years trying to stop them witnessing it on television, in you, in your neighbours' faces. Then you realize, slowly, that there is no escape, that they must steer their own way through life's cruelties.

In THE CHILDREN, Charlotte Wood, one of Australian fiction's rising stars, delivers a short, sharp shock of a novel that takes us into the heart of a family as normal, and as broken, as any other.

This acutely observed novel exposes the tenacious grip of childhood, the way siblings seem to grow apart but never do, and explores the price paid for bearing witness to the suffering of others - whether far away or uncomfortably close to home. THE CHILDREN marks Wood as one of our finest writers.

Charlotte Wood's first novel, Pieces of a Girl, won the 1998 Jim Hamilton Award for an unpublished ms (published in 1998). THE CHILDREN was shortlisted for the 2005 Miles Franklin Award and the 2005 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, SE Asia/Sth Pacific.
www.charlottewood.com.au