Jill and her dad are happy enough after her mother dies. Theirs is a simple life in the outback, far from the big city where a coathanger is being built across a sparkling harbour.

Until Jack arrives at their door one evening, and steps inside to find the skinny, wild-looking child sitting with her grim-faced father. It's the start of all Jill's problems.

'Absence makes the heart grow fonder,' threatens Jack, as he marches off to war. And he's right, in a way - but this is no ordinary romance.

Spanning the period from the Depression to the freewheeling '60s, Helen Hodgman's second novel, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, is a masterpiece, a twisted fairytale told with her characteristic dark wit.

Helen Hodgman was the author of the novels Blue Skies (1976), Jack and Jill (1978; winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), Broken Words (1988; winner of the Christina Stead Prize), Passing Remarks (1996), Waiting for Matindi (1998) and The Bad Policeman (2001). She died in June, 2022.

'What a boon to Australian writing Helen Hodgman is - the playful, brooding ice sculptor of human weirdness.' Craig Sherborne