REPENTANCE

REPENTANCE is about family, about belonging, and about people swept up in moments which will affect not only their own communities, but the wider world in which they live.

It's the summer of 1976, and the winds of change are blowing through the small town of Repentance on the edge of the Great Dividing Range. The old families farmed cattle and cut timber in ways unchanged for generations — but the new settlers have a different perspective on the natural order and humankind's place in the scheme of things.

Linda Curtis is the latest blow-in to town, where the hippies have gathered and an environmental protest is being planned. She's new to the district, but she shares a past — and a secret — with the protesters' militant leader. Sandy Mitchell runs the sawmill that employs half the town. In the story he learnt as a boy and has never sought to question, he now finds himself cast as the bad man.

From behind the counter of the town's shop, thirteen-year-old Joanne Parmenter struggles to make sense of what's happening to her town, while her mother succumbs to cancer in the house behind her.

As the quiet rhythms of the bush are disturbed, no one will escape the coming confrontation.

Alison Gibbs was born in Kyogle in 1963 and spent her childhood in the towns and villages of northern New South Wales. She now lives in Sydney, where she runs her own writing consultancy producing copy for United Nations agencies and the not-for-profit sector. Her short stories and essays have been published and broadcast in Australia and the United Kingdom and have received numerous short-listings and awards. Repentance is her first novel.