by Patricia Holland

… contemporary Australian fiction

Everyone controls Sophie. She can’t walk and she can’t talk, but behind her disability hides a keen intelligence. Living on The Styx River cattle station with her father and a nanny, Sophie is acutely aware that she is a non-person. She feels as voiceless and isolated as the wallabies of The Wall, an eerie wilderness of basalt lava tubes forming a natural stone labyrinth that protects its remote lushness from anyone foolish enough to wander in. How can one impossibly disabled girl who can’t help herself, help save the lives of others?

The Styx by Patricia Holland—available now (stockists).

Ask at your favourite bookshop (or a bookshop that is handy).

• The Tennis Party at Squire’s Leap, Mountain Top

  
  

  Squires Leap, (locally known as Petticoat Hill, not sure why), Mountain Top, the much-admired property and home of Ms Beatrice Smith and her niece, Ms Edie Ellis, and location of frequent and highly celebrated tennis parties. Invitations for which are greatly sought after and much anticipated.
  

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I acknowledge Australia’s traditional custodians, and specifically the Gangulu people and country where Sophie rests, and the Darumbal people of the Central Queensland region, the Woppabura people of the Keppel Islands and the Bundjalung Nation on the North Coast of NSW where  most of my writing takes place.  I pay my respects to past and present Indigenous communities, to Elders past, present, and emerging, and to Indigenous Australians’ rich culture of art and storytelling.