Joy Dettman

The wind is whispering in Woody Creek. Change is in the air. It's 1958 and Woody Creek is being dragged kicking and screaming into the swinging '60s....

On a balmy midsummer's evening in 1923, a young woman - foreign, dishevelled and heavily pregnant - is found unconscious just off the railway tracks....

Jenny Morrison takes refuge with Ray King, a slightly sinister, stuttering boy who disappeared from Woody Creek as a teenager but has now reappeared....

Lori Smyth-Owen isn't your average teenager - as you'd expect from the only girl in a family of 12. Or they were a family, until their father took his own life to escape his bed-bound wife, too obese to leave her room....

Ann Burton was born on a river bank the night her father tried to burn their house down. Six years later, her sister, Liza, disappears while they are staying at their uncle's property....

When Jenny Morrison fled Woody Creek for a new life in Melbourne she left behind a dysfunctional family, a town of small-minded gossips, and, most tragically, a newborn baby....

Woody Creek is gearing up for its centenary celebrations - but for many of its townspeople, it's just another reminder of the old days....

For 44 years Stella Templeton has been a dutiful daughter and a good citizen living in Maidenville, population 2,800, a town where nothing happens....

A novel of small-town survival ... and a train that arrived too late....