Ripiro Beach: A Memoir of Life After Near Death

Description

Does DNA write our destinies? Or do the hands that nurture triumph over nature? What is it that determines who we really are? Caroline Barron's father never found his birth mother. After he dies suddenly on her twentieth birthday, Caroline develops an insidious fear of her own untimely death. When she nearly bleeds out on an operating table during childbirth, it almost seems her greatest fear is justified. Emerging from the experience a changed woman, Caroline spends the next six years poring over her family history in an attempt to make sense of her inexplicable rage. The family secrets she unearths threaten to destabilise her identity and carefully built life, eventually leading her to Northland's rugged Ripiro Beach, where past and present dramatically collide. Ripiro Beach is a beautifully written, relentlessly honest memoir about one woman's determination to gather the threads of a life that has come undone.

Caroline Barron is an award-winning writer, manuscript assessor, book reviewer, columnist, and board member of the Michael King Writers Centre. She holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Auckland (2015) and, in a previous life, owned and managed Nova, a leading model and talent agency. Caroline resides between Auckland's Point Chevalier and Northland's Ripiro (Baylys) Beach, with her husband and two young daughters.

Ripiro Beach: A Memoir of Life After Near Death is one powerful read. I found it riveting, at times confronting, very moving, very passionate. And I identified with so many things you wrote about.... I think it's a very brave book and I congratulate you on it. I was certainly drawn into it and I thank you for the opportunity to read it. You write with clarity and sensibility(or equally sensitivity) about an experience that many people have in one way or another but don't talk about, or don't necessarily articulate to themselves.' - Dame Fiona Kidman