Without allure, we'd be bored to death and yet it can take us in so completely we forget who we are and where we live and what we are striving for. The allure of the mythical good life makes dupes of us all. The orchid blooms and we're seduced.

Window Gods draws us into the many lives of Isobel as artist, mother, daughter, sister, wife and friend. In the midst of a life that tugs her in all directions Isobel is rammed sideways – her half-sister has brought a law suit against her, her peers are criticising her, and her brother-in-law has been diagnosed with cancer.

Then her son disappears.

In a modern-day Middlemarch, Isobel sets off to Afghanistan in search of her missing child while bush fires rage on her home horizon.

Incisive, witty and wise, Window Gods captures the chaos and contradictions of contemporary life and death with Morrison's shrewd insight, dry humour and inimitable style.

Morrison is unusual among contemporary Australian novelists ... She is unafraid of ideas; her work reveals a quirky independence, a reluctance to follow fashion, besides shrewd insights into what makes human beings tick. Andrew Riemer

An award-winning author of novels, short stories, a play and a biography, Sally Morrison originally trained as a molecular biologist before launching a rich and varied writing career. In 2013 she travelled to Afghanistan as an observer with the Afghan–Australian Development Organisation.