Shadows of Winter Robins

‘Nancy won’t be coming home.’

And there it is: that pip of a moment. That instant. That fraction of a second. That weightless stillness at the very top of a ball’s bounce, between its going up and falling down.

My brother and I held hands, suspended somewhere in between the life we’d led as Nancy’s children, and the one we were destined to live thereafter.

Winter Robins is a happy enough child, growing up in the north of England, with parents who love her and the constant companion of a twin brother, but a cold wind blows through when her mother dies. Her father turns to the bottle, her grandmother struggles to cope, and she and her brother are sent to live in Western Australia with family their mother had never mentioned.

Although Winter quickly settles in Australia and comes to love her life and the people in it, she notices strange happenings in the shadows of her new home. When a news story prompts her to look back at her past, she begins to wonder whether things were really as idyllic as she remembers them.

As she uncovers secret after secret, she realises a much darker narrative may have been – and perhaps still is – playing out ...