Tracy Farr

In Cassetown, Geologue Bay, Iris and her extended family — her ex-husband and his wife and their new baby; her son and her best friend’s daughter — gather on a midwinter long weekend, to pack up the family holiday house now that it has been sold. They are together for one last time, one last weekend, one last party. As the house is stripped bare, their secrets — and the complex, messy nature of family relationships — will be revealed. The Hope Fault is a celebration of the complexities of family — aunties and steps and exes, and a baby in need of a name; parents and partners who are missing, and the people who replace them. It’s about the faultlines that run under the surface, and it’s about uncertainty — the unsettling notion that the earth might shift, literally or metaphorically, at any moment. It’s a contemporary novel that plays with time and with ways of telling stories. It finds poetry and beauty in science, and pattern and magic in landscape.