Hester is raised in near-total isolation by violently religious parents, and understands the world through a private language of animals, biblical figures and transformed household objects.

When she is finally exposed to life beyond the family home, ordinary suburbia appears to her as something ecstatic, bewildering and dangerous. Laguna builds the novel entirely through Hester’s distorted but fiercely coherent consciousness. The result is unsettling without becoming merely bleak: a study of childhood imagination as both a prison built by adults and a means of psychic survival.

Allen & Unwin, 2008, second printing. Paperback in very good condition with light shelf wear.