Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
A devastatingly beautiful story about the broken bonds of childhood, and the enduring cost of holding back the truth.
“They were inescapable, the tensions of the adult world—the fraught and febrile aura that surrounded Ishtar and those in her orbit, that whined and creaked like a wire pulled too tight.”
It is the winter of 1985. Hope Farm sticks out of the ragged landscape like a decaying tooth, its weatherboard walls sagging into the undergrowth. Silver's mother, Ishtar, has fallen for the charismatic Miller, and the three of them have moved to the rural hippie commune to make a new start.
At Hope, Silver finds unexpected friendship and, at last, a place to call home. But it is also here that, at just thirteen, she is thrust into an unrelenting adult world—and the walls begin to come tumbling down, with deadly consequences.
“Frew’s second novel is an Australian cousin of T.C. Boyle's Drop City, Lauren Groff's Arcadia, and other novels about the failures of communal living, with additional connections to Esther Freud's Hideous Kinky and Ian McEwan's Atonement.”
—Kirkus
“In exploring what happens to the love between a parent and child when the rules of that relationship dissolve, and where the freedoms overwhelm, Frew exposes the raw tenderness of loving but not being loved in return.”
—The Guardian
“[E]legiac, storied…aligns itself with other novels in which children—out of rashness, anger or even ignorance—act out to terrible consequences. As with Briony in Ian McEwan’s Atonement or Leo in L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, these decisions are usually compounded by circumstance…Frew does not want to pass judgment though. She understands that the sadness of childhood is to grow up in circumstances over which you have little or no control.”
—Sydney Morning Herald
“Hope Farm is a complex novel which tells the story of a mother and her child, yet ultimately looks at the choices we make, the reasons we make them and the consequences of our decisions. The result is a moving story, which is firmly placed in its historical and social context. The author is compassionate to her flawed characters and the reader is left with a sense of sadness but hope. In this carefully constructed novel Peggy Frew demonstrates her skill as a fine storyteller, crafting a captivating and suspenseful story which resonates long after the final page is turned.”
—from the citation by the Australian State Library of Victoria for the International IMPAC Dublin Prize