Kim Scott

Authors first novel, set in a remote Aboriginal mission in the north-west of W.A.

Stories about women in time for Christmas and the summer holidays. From the mad excitement of first love to the grief of losing a parent, this is a summer collection about mums, daughters, wives and girlfriends from some of Australia's best-loved writers.

"Told through the eyes of black and white, young and old, this is a story about fledgling Western Australian community in the early 1800s known as the 'friendly frontier'. Poetic, warm-hearted and bold, it is a story which shows that first contact did not have to lead to war."--Back cover.

"Novelist Kim Scott and his elder, Hazel Brown, have created a family history of the Wilomin Noongar people. Kayang & Me is a story of community and belonging, revealing the deep and enduring connections between family, country, culture and history that lie at the heart of Indigenous identity."--Jacket.

Taboo takes place in the present day, in the rural South-West of Western Australia, and tells the story of a group of Noongar people who revisit, for the first time in many decades, a taboo place: the site of a massacre that followed the assassination, by these Noongar's descendants, of a white man who had stolen a black woman. They come at the invitation of Dan Horton, the elderly owner of the farm on which the massacres unfolded. He hopes that by hosting the group he will satisfy his wife's dying wishes and cleanse some moral stain from the ground on which he and his family have lived for generations. But the sins of the past will not be so easily expunged. We walk with the ragtag group through this taboo country and note in them glimmers of re-connection with language, lore, country. We learn alongside them how countless generations of Noongar may have lived in ideal rapport with the land. This is a novel of survival and renewal, as much as destruction; and, ultimately, of hope as much as despair.