Sometimes it feels to Mavis Hawkins that she has spent her whole life waiting. But now her only daughter Lena is flying in from New York, and her life is about to change forever. Now she has to tell her daughter the truth. But for Lena Hawkins, the truth is the last thing she wants to hear. What is she even doing here? She belongs in New York. Why has she even come home? It is all her mother’s fault. Two women, two lives, two paths. But are they so very different? In this poignant, dark, humane and funny novel, mother and daughter take turns on the Jason Reclina Rocker, opening old wounds and replaying old scripts, struggling with what can and cannot be said on those hard, hot February days when coming home to Perth Western Australia is the last thing in the world any young woman-of-the-world would dream of doing. From Perth to Manhattan, from Rachael Carson’s Silent Spring to the birth of the Karaoke clip, from the world of art (Andy Warhol?) to Astrakhan collars, Cusp is a novel about how small worlds are part of big worlds. It’s also about being a girl, about loving your mother, about life and death, and about not quite being there and almost being here.