OUR MAGIC HOUR

OUR MAGIC HOUR is a story of love, loss and discovery. Jennifer Down's remarkable novel captures the moment when being young and invincible gives way to being open and vulnerable, when one terrible act changes a life forever.

Audrey, Katy and Adam have been friends since high school, a decade of sneaky cigarettes, drunken misadventures on backstreets, heart-to-hearts, in-jokes.

But now Katy has gone. And without her, Audrey is thrown off balance: everything she thought she knew, everything she believed was true, is bent out of shape.

Audrey's family – her neurotic mother, her wayward teenage brother, her uptight suburban sister – are likely to fall apart. Her boyfriend, Nick, tries to hold their relationship together. And Audrey, caught in the middle, needs to find a reason to keep going when everything around her suddenly seems wrong.

Jennifer Down is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in publications including the Age, Saturday Paper, Australian Book Review and Overland. OUR MAGIC HOUR was shortlisted for the 2014 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript.