Salt Rain

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. As the intoxicating heat of the wet season builds, Allie tries to decipher the truth and lies that her mother has told her, and must come to grips with the many secrets held close in the valley.

Beautifully written, Salt Rain is an extraordinary evocation of the moods of the inexorable rainforest, of families and of the secrets hidden within them.