Sylvia's Solution

Book excerpt: After losing her son and husband, and moving off the family farm into the city, Sylvia fi lls her days with visits to the local library, computer classes, her granddaughter, and retribution. Sylvia watched her own family fall apart, and those of her friends, not to mention the slow disintegration of her beloved hometown, Boganindra, in country New South Wales. Sylvia begins to feel helpless, and hopeless. Until she has a chance meeting with a man in her computer class at the local library. She learns that something can be done. There are ways to stop someone from ruining peoples’ lives. From taking over the “failing” mum-and-dad businesses in small towns and incorporating them into much bigger, modern, mechanised businesses and then making their long serving staff “redundant”. With an uncanny knack of fading into the shadows, and being very “unmemorable”, Sylvia not only fi nds it almost impossible to get any kind of service in a coffee shop, but she fi nds that when she really needs to “disappear in a crowd” she has no trouble.