Glenda Adams

This dark, brilliant, aching, astonishingly unsentimental story within a tale within a mystery is haunted by impending doom. Clemenza's mother writes this story in tribute to the child she has lost. Her challenge is to write without sentimentality and without the dishonesty of romance, even while she acknowledges that sentiment and romance are important to young girls. This mother, whose own life has been wounded by malevolent men, wants to allow her child her dreamy hopes without seeing them abused by a world of masculine violence. A storm-tossed lake in Vermont, Shakespeare, academic word bullies in an Australian university, James Joyce, a mysterious van, a kidnapping, a lost manuscript, each thread weaves with the next, tighter and tighter in this highly intelligent and unsettling novel.

This novel envisions a distopian society beset by frequent revolutions and characterised by cruel bureaucracies. Heroine Neila becomes an enemy of the state (the Complex) because she believes her parents were killed as resisters. Placed in a household of ultra-orthodox Complexers, she hides her true thoughts, even after falling in love with foster brother Lak. But things are not as they seem: her foster family is arrested and disappears; Neila's dissident companions (evil, voluptuous Serena; powerful Wils, who briefly becomes Neila's lover) may or may not be double agents. Neila herself ends up as Acting Minister of Information for the Complex; in which capacity she risks her own freedom, hoping to undermine the system, release political prisoners, and find Lak. Her adventures take her to the different territories of the Complex, including the Mountain (inhabited by a distinctive ethnic group from which Neila is in part descended) and the Island (the penal colony where resisters are dumped).