Kate Evans

They're part of old Australia, or that's how they see themselves, because at various points in the past, they'd actually lost their money and regained it again.

And so, as Michael said, all the attention and all the expectations are on this baby.

And just to give you the sense of how he's imagined.

For the Cormacks, he was always big boy and little man and prince and troublemaker and cowboy and boss and heartbreaker.

Making Emma feel like the steer, the servant, the slip ventricle.

This child would have it all.

He would take all, all, all of her she knew.

And she could do nothing but offer herself up for the taking.

So while they're building up this baby, she's building up her sort of resentment and this sense of a woman under siege.

So it's this strange, claustrophobic world that we're entering into.

And the dynasty.

Because, you know, they are part of this old school version of the place that they live in.

And we keep getting flashes of the past.

So Robert and Emma were at the same private school, but Emma was like a scholarship girl.

And he was very much, well, he was very much an old boy.

I mean, what did you make of the sort of the privilege of that sense of the past that she gives us?

So we meet all of these characters and we're getting both the before and after this tragedy.

So they're the main players.

But it seems to me that from pretty early on in this book, you know that it's Emma, the mother, who has killed the child.

Hang on, is this a spoiler?