Finding Jasper
It is 1956, and twelve-year old Gin has arrived at the family farm, ‘Grasswood’, in the South West of Western Australia. She has been left in the care of her lively, idiosyncratic aunt, Attie, while her mother, an English war bride, returns home for a holiday. Gin is the youngest of three generations of very different women, whose lives are profoundly affected by the absence of Jasper: son, brother, husband, father. A fixed point in all their lives is the landscape, layered with beauty and fear, challenge and consolation, isolation and freedom. Beautifully written, Finding Jasper is an acute, sensitive search for love and a sense of self in a rapidly changing world.
About the Book
It is 1956, and twelve-year old Gin has arrived at the family farm, 'Grasswood', in the South West of Western Australia. She has been left in the care of her lively, idiosyncratic aunt, Attie, while her mother, an English war bride, returns home for a holiday. Gin is the youngest of three generations of very different women, whose lives are profoundly affected by the absence of Jasper: son, brother, husband, father. A fixed point in all their lives is the landscape, layered with beauty and fear, challenge and consolation, isolation and freedom. Beautifully written, Finding Jasper is an acute, sensitive search for love and a sense of self in a rapidly changing world.
“Lynne Leonhardt’s luminous debut novel evokes a bygone Western Australia with the hard clarity and emotional deftness of Tim Winton, while weaving together themes of childhood, family, love and loss as bittersweetly as central character Gin’s beloved Schumann did in his
piano music.”
“Finding Jasper offers the reader a wonderful experience of the fine grain of a time that has passed: the tensions and passions of lives which have had their direction changed by war and the loss or restitution of love.”
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