Winner of the 2006 Australian/Vogel Literary Award, Castles (Falling Woman
) spins a brooding and intricate contemporary saga about the denizens of an Australian riverside hamlet. Rose Baker, an author of women's erotica, lives alone and rents a small house from her sister Billie's boyfriend, James Mancini. After a brief and loveless fling with James, Rose discovers she's pregnant, but delays in telling Billie. Trying to escape from his abusive father, Danny Raine moved to the secluded village after faking his own drowning. Using the alias “Danny Reynolds,” he operates a local water taxi and is attracted to the lonely Rose. But Rose takes up with Kane, a drug dealer with a shady past. The other residents of the town—including a man who copes with the loss of his family by setting fires in the surrounding forest—and their various relationships are deftly interwoven, though the climax is somewhat predictable. The “River Baptists” of the title—euphoric churchgoers often found in their baptismal pools—give the otherwise dour narrative a glimmer of hope and redemption. (Oct.)
