WILDFLOWERS

Peggy Frew is a consummate observer of human frailty, a talent for which she was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award - Australia's most prestigious literature prize - twice, first for her second novel Hope Farm and then for her third novel Islands. And in Wildflowers she has excelled at it again - it's a riveting, compassionate and affecting portrait of a family coping with addiction.

Three sisters: Meg, Nina and Amber. More different than alike, but forever connected nevertheless. Meg and Nina have been outshone by their younger sister Amber since childhood. They have become used to living on the margins of their parents' interest, used to others turning away from them and towards charismatic Amber. But Amber's life has not gone the way they all thought it would: heroin as a teenager, later opioids. Approaching middle-age resolute Meg makes a decision. A final attempt at getting Amber clean. A weekend away in Far North Queensland, in a remote house in the rainforest, no one around. Meg flushes all of Amber's tablets down the toilet and forces her to go cold turkey, tying her to the bed in the process. Indecisive Nina is horrified, but doesn't interfere. A few days later they emerge from the basement room, shattered, but through the worst. The three sisters leave, forever altered by the experience. In the years that follow it is now Nina who shuts down, removes herself from her family, her friends, the world really. Wearing clothes picked up from second-hand collection bins and eating nothing but eggs and rocket she is unable to escape a deep and debilitating depression. A series of flashbacks into the sisters' child- and early adulthood gives us a glimpse into how the three women came to be the way they are - and ultimately it's their sisterly bond that leaves us with a sense of hope. Wildflowers is a compassionate and at times surprisingly funny novel that is impossible to put down and even harder to forget. PEGGY FREW is based in Melbourne. Her first novel, House of Sticks, won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript by an Emerging Victorian Writer, and was shortlisted for the UTS Glenda Adams Prize for New Writing. Hope Farm, her second novel, won the Barbara Jefferis Award, was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Her third novel, Islands, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. She has been published in New Australian Stories 2, Kill Your Darlings, Meanjin and The Big Issue. Peggy is also a member of the critically acclaimed and award-winning Melbourne band Art of Fighting. Wildflowers is her fourth novel.