Darker Days Than Usual/90s

'Cassie came to Helen's sixth birthday party in scarlet hotpants. She played in the garden with the other little girls. The mothers who had come to help were in the living room smoothing paper tablecloths across tables and pouring beakerfuls of cherryade, leaning against the window sills and nibbling at sausage rolls and twiglets. The children had taken outside with them fistfuls of iced gems ... I watched Cassie riding Helen's new bike around and around the lawn. Now l. Feel sure that if Laura had ever wanted to harm herself then the explanation must lie with Cassie'. During one long shining summer of school trips, games in the playground, amber limbs in the long grass and sudden rain, the secretary puzzles over why her assistant, Laura, is increasingly wan and withdrawn. Bit by bit she pieces together the real, disturbing story of the two sisters' past before she turns, inevitably and painfully, to her own. Suzannah Dunn gives us. Stories of the suburbs which are as brittle as they are funny. Her observations snip away at home life until, little by little, we discover the secret truths women find so difficult to tell.