Inspired by a true story of a mother's twisted love, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky paints the haunting portrait of a young orphan's quest for truth. A bizarre mystery surrounding a family tragedy forms the centrepiece of Rachel's struggle as an astonishingly beautiful mixed-race child in a mostly black community.As terrible secrets begin to emerge, Rachel learns to swallow her grief and construct her self-image in a world that wants to see her as either Black or White.

A mother, trapped between fear and despair. A girl, tumbling from the sky. And a boy, standingby his window, who watches her fall. The sole survivor of a horrific family tragedy, Rachel is sent to live with a grandmother she's never met, and thrust for the first time into a black community where her light brown skin and startling blue eyes provoke a constant stream of attention. Grappling with a world that demands her to be either white or black, and struggling with her grief, she begins to understand how the mystery of her mother's desperate action connects to her own uncertain identity and the tangle of lives left behind. The Girl Who Fell from the Sky is a searing and heart-wrenching portrait of a young girl dealing with society's ideas of race and class, whose story comes to encapsulate a humanity at once terribly fragile and astonishingly resilient. Winner of the Bellwether Prize for best unpublished novel addressing issues of social justice