Elizabeth Flock

A novel for anyone who has ever had to accept an imperfect life in a world that expects perfection. While breaking the news of Princess Diana's death to millions, reporter Isabel Murphy unravels on live television. Coming back down to earth at a psychiatric hospital, Isabel begins the painful process of recovering the life everyone thought she had. Refusing to co–operate with her doctors, Isabel finds it hard to believe she belongs at Three Winds with schizophrenic Lark and silent Sukanya. It will take drastic measures to convince Isabel that she can be helped and that she must confront her past, in order to ensure her future.

Compared to some, Henry Powell's life has been lucky, if inauspicious. Yet Henry is impossibly stuck, unable to reconcile the dreams and expectations of his promising youth with the reality of the unassuming, vaguely dissatisfied clothing store clerk he has become. As weeks turn into months and months into years, the shop becomes Henry's only window to the world, where he marks time by the milestones of his former classmates' lives. But his day–to–day measured existence inadvertently conceals a fracture that has caused the disintegration of his family, one that will ultimately reveal the Henry that might have been.

As the big sister, Carrie is determined to do anything to keep Emma safe from a life of neglect and abuse at the hands of their drunken stepfather – a situation her mother can't seem to see, let alone prevent.

After the sisters plan to runaway from their impoverished home unravels, Carrie's world takes a shocking turn – with devastating results. In one shattering moment in the Parker sisters' lives, a startling act of violence ultimately reveals a truth that leaves everyone reeling.

By turns poignant, disarming and bittersweet, Me & Emma is the story of an endearingly precocious child and her determined fight to put the pieces of her fractured childhood back together.

Once defined by her career and independence, stay–at–home mum Samantha Friedman finds that her days have been reduced to errands, car pools and suburban gossip. What was an easy decision for Sam years ago has become a nagging awareness that this life was her choice. Now she deals with a husband who shows up for dinner but is too preoccupied for conversation, and a daughter swathed in black clothing and Goth makeup who won't talk at all.

Believing she's an adopted mistake, seventeen–year–old Cammy has fallen into sex and drugs and pours herself into a journal filled with poetry and pain. On parallel paths, mother and daughter indulge in desperate, furtive escapism – for Sam, a heady affair with her supposed soul mate, fuelled by clandestine coffee dates and the desire to feel something; for Cammy, a secretive search for her birth mother punctuated by pills, pot and the need to feel absolutely nothing.