Evidence

Description

the new novel from Australia's hottest national columnist and award-winning author. A teenage boy is set alight and burnt to death. His fourteen-year-old neighbour, Cheryl Jane Kiss, is determined to find out who is responsible. Like the beautiful sunsets reflected in the town's sewage treatment works, nothing in tantanoula is quite what it seems. Cheryl's mother, Violet, the town's celebrity television newsreader, has more than a few secrets of her own ... if she could only just remember ... Cheryl's stepfather, Jackson Kiss, complicit in his stepdaughter's binge eating, aids her education by leaving adult magazines under her mattress. And as for Cheryl's friends What friends? Cheryl is badly shaken by Samuel Leadhead's death. If only she could find the evidence that would explain it all ... Fast-paced, passionate, hilarious, hectic, and deeply moving, Evidence is the dark side of life on the fringes in Australia. Not since Holden Caulfield has a character so summed up the heartbreak of adolescence.

Emma Tom is an award-winning Sydney writer and broadcaster. Her column appears in The Australian newspaper each Thursday and she freelances widely for magazines and newspapers both in Australia and overseas. She has written six books including a novel, DEADSET, which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Asia and the South Pacific for Best First Novel in 1997. In her spare time, Emma tutors and lectures at assorted Sydney universities and is inching her way through a PhD at the University of New South Wales.