Michaela Kolofsky

And we realise as the adult reader, not as the child, that she's clearly very ill and she's dying and she's going to leave us

Molly and not make her witness the death that she's going to experience.

So she tells Molly to turn around and look at the sky and that she'll always be in the sky ready to answer her questions.

And then she walks away.

She disappears.

And so Molly's left alone.

But when she does finally turn around, she finds that there's a gift at her feet that's been left behind.

I thought that was a very Trent Dalton line.

Yes, and Violet tells her daughter Molly to turn her heart to stone, not because that's what she wants for her daughter, but we learn afterwards that she's going to need a heart of stone to survive the world that she's about to be left alone in.

Her father is violent himself and nasty and his brother...

Aubrey is actually sadistic.

So she's there on her own.

We fast forward about five years to when Molly is 12 and she's been without her mum but has learned to get by.

And this is when the Japanese air raids of Darwin are about to begin.

And I think, really, this is where the quest part of the novel begins, actually.

There's a journey that Molly is about to go on that she doesn't even know that she's going to go on it or with whom this is where that begins.

A very vivid description of the air raids on Darwin in 1942, Michaela.

It really shocked me, I have to say.

Oh, it's still evident on the streets.

You can still see a collapsed church from that time.