Aoife Clifford

And I thoroughly recommend if anybody's thinking about getting into writing any women out there, it's an excellent competition to enter.

I was at home at the time with my other two kids going a little bit crazy and I just set it as my New Year's resolution to enter it.

And lo and behold, here I am, I don't know, 12, 13 years later, still writing.

So it's fantastic.

Oh, I was really interested with what Marla was just saying then, the arbitrary nature of it, that at times, essentially because it has all the power is on him.

I mean, Odette is asking for nothing other than this tiny, simple life with her granddaughter, and yet not even that is allowed.

Like, it really is quite astounding.

I also loved when Tony had...

Um, Odette gets to see, gets to see her file at some stage in the book.

And, um, there's this amazing comment, and I'm sure Tony's based it off something in reality, of, uh, you know, essentially, um, Odette was someone who didn't know her place, a young native woman who didn't know her place.

And that's an official recording of her because, and I think it was in relation to an incident where her husband has been killed in a mining accident, and because she sort of asked for compensation and wanted an inquiry into what had happened.

And that is quite a powerfully devastating part of the novel, I think.

The heartlessness of officialdom in this case, and then we see it enacted in one particular character.

I think also what Tony's doing, because it is so recent, and perhaps to burst our sort of congratulatory bubble that we've had recently about that referendum passing, because it's been an anniversary, to say, yes, that was a great moment, but look what was surrounding it at the time.

And it is only in the 60s.

I mean, it's quite appalling, really.

Oh, look, this is a beautifully written book and it's really just fantastic.

So the structure of the story is that each chapter is a sort of its own separate short story.

But bringing it all together is this first chapter that you were just mentioning, Cassie, where two young girls, Alonya and Sophia, are on the beach.

They're two sisters.