Author(s): Carol Lefevre

Fiction

On the fourteenth of February 1962, in the outback settlement of Sugarbag, Esther Hayes looked out of the schoolhouse window and saw three children struck by lightning. The boys were playing cricket on a strip of stubble field that did for a schoolyard; minutes earlier she had heard them laughing as they hammered in the wicket.. Numbed by tragedy, Esther retreats into silence, while her young daughter, Aurora, is left to fend for herself. Aurora's childhood is played out against the backdrop of her father's absence and her mother's neglect, and she is forced to take comfort wherever she can. The fierce attachments she forms never seem to last - until she abandons Australia for Dublin, and her father's native Tipperary. If You Were Mine is a story of mothers and daughters, of the anguish of unexpected partings, and the intense delight that can descend out of the blue.