Wildflowers

A compassionate and surprisingly funny novel that is impossible to put down and even harder to forget, from the award-winning author of Islands.

They were still who they always had been, still those sisters, but on this afternoon, in this car, driving with the windows down between cane fields under a deepening sky with purple cut-out mountains in the distance, they were wearing it so lightly, their bossiness and flakiness and wildness; they were wearing it like they used to, like it was supple, slippery, not completely fixed. Like it could be taken off.'
…
In the car Meg had been laughing too. Meg and Amber laughing in the front and Nina in the back hiding secret tears of hope behind her sunglasses. They had been close then, the three of them, together in that moment of lightness…

Meg and Nina have been outshone by their younger sister Amber since childhood. They have become used to living on the margins of their parents' interest, used to others turning away from them and towards charismatic Amber.

But Amber's life has not gone the way they all thought it would, and now the three of them are together for the first time in years, on the road to a remote holiday rental in Far North Queensland, where Meg and Nina plan on helping Amber overcome her addiction. As good intentions gradually become terrifying reality, these sisters will test the limits of love and the line between care and control.

Peggy Frew is a consummate observer of human frailty and fragile love, and in Wildflowers she has created a riveting, compassionate and affecting novel that is impossible to put down and even harder to forget.

About the Author

Peggy Frew's first novel, House of Sticks, won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript by an Emerging Victorian Writer, and was shortlisted for the UTS Glenda Adams Prize for New Writing. Hope Farm, her second novel, won the Barbara Jefferis Award, was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Her third novel, Islands, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. She has been published in New Australian Stories 2, Kill Your Darlings, Meanjin and The Big Issue. Peggy is also a member of the critically acclaimed and award-winning Melbourne band Art of Fighting. Wildflowers is her fourth novel.