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The liberated 60s have not reached the shores of New Zealand
when Claire, a single pregnant girl is sent up-country to have her child,
which is to be adopted out.
The Sloane family are strangers who offer to board her through this time.
But are they?
Claire is thrust into the unknown when, immediately after her arrival,
Alan and Hazel Sloane are involved in a truck accident on the farm. It
is up to Claire to help. She does but is now alone on the farm. Initial
fears at being alone reach a climax when an elderly man arrives to look
after the animals.
He is Bob Hodge, Hazel's father. Claire and Bob feed out in the snow and
gradually an affinity develops between the pair.
Claire's life is at a tangent and a thread of facts begins to unwind about
herself and the family she is living with. Tragedies of the past surface
and actions of the present complicate issues.
The local schoolteacher enters Claire's life with consequences that could
be tragic while two local women show their true colours.
In this conservative rural area, the tranquillity of the surface hides
a darker background that goes back a generation to before Claire was born.
And she is directly involved.
This is a story of how scars of the past are opened and conquered by
the love of the present for and by Claire, a girl who becomes a woman
in the months that make up 1961.
Copyright ©2007
Ross Richdale
National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication
Data
Richdale, Ross, 1941-
Claire / Ross Richdale.
ISBN 978-1-877438-06-6
I. Title.
NZ823.3—dc 22
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may
be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmittedin any form
or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopied, recorded or otherwise,
without the priorwritten permission of the author.
This novel is fiction.Names, characters, places and incidents are the
products of the author's imagination or are used fictiously, and any
reference to actual persons, living or dead , business establishments,
events or locales , is entirely coincidental.
Purrbooks
Palmerston North
New Zealand
Cover design by Ross Richdale
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