Salt Rain

About the book

An extraordinarily evocative novel of discovery, where fourteen-year-old Allie gradually realises that the picture of the past she is piecing together is different and much more complicated than she ever thought.Allie’s free-spirited mother, Mae, mysteriously disappears on Sydney Harbour one night, her dinghy found drifting in the darkness. Fourteen-year-old Allie is whisked away to the north, to a rainforested valley, by Julia, an aunt she barely knows. On the dilapidated dairy farm where Mae and Julia grew up, Allie waits for her mother to call.As these anxious days pass, Allie learns about Mae’s childhood and about Mae herself through the eyes of others. Allie watches her aunt, who is determined to return the valley to its natural order, replanting the trees of the forest that her grandfather cleared for grazing. And she watches her mother’s first love who she discovers still lives in the valley.