Meanwhile, the war comes and goes out there somewhere: the troops pass, the shows are cancelled, men return wounded or not at all. As the parents decline, Lainey grows in strength and the novel leads to her great moment, her great jump and her rescue from a terrible fate. Roley falls ill, struck by lightning, and eventually Noah takes to drink - helped along by her boarding-house-running aunts - and is increasingly frowned upon by her husband's family. The other child, Lainey, is as inward with horses as her parents and has as much of a gift for showjumping as they do.

But the family shows strength when their second child, George, is born a little short of the full quid and Roley refuses to have him institutionalised. Things don't run as smoothly as they might: she is the object of his family's prejudices: his mother is certain she has a touch of the tar brush. Noah's circumstances improve when her talent for showjumping introduces her to Roley, the Wirri champion. She gives birth in the open while her unknowing father is off drinking and floats the baby on the river in a milk box at this stage at least, she is relieved simply to have survived and to be rid of the burden, though the baby will not stop haunting her. The novel opens before the Second World War with 14-year-old Noah droving pigs with her father and pregnant to her old uncle, Nipper. Once again, we are in the towns and farms of northern New South Wales but back in time, like the world of some of the earlier stories the world, it seems, of local legend, brought to specific, fleshed-out life.

Foal's Bread by Gillian Mears