Amy's Children

Book excerpt: Abandoned by her feckless husband during the Depression, Amy decides to leave her country town, and her three infant children, and try her luck in the big smoke. Life in wartime Sydney is far from easy, but for Amy there are the hard-won satisfactions of an office job and a house of her own. Until her eldest, Kathleen, appears needing a home while she attends high school. And Amy falls in love with a married man... Enlivened with note-perfect observations of the everyday, wrenching in its portrayal of a young woman struggling to succeed yet often wilfully ignorant of her own children, Olga Masters' second and last novel is a triumph. At its centre is Amy, one of the great characters in Australian literature. This edition comes with an introduction by the novelist Eva Hornung. Olga Masters was born in Pambula, New South Wales, in 1919. She married at twenty-one and had seven children, working part-time as a journalist, leaving her little opportunity to develop her interest in creative writing until she was in her fifties. In the 1970s Masters wrote a radio play and a stage play, and between 1977 and 1981 she won prizes for her short stories. Her debut, the short-story collection The Home Girls, won a National Book Council Award in 1983. She wrote two novels and three collections of stories, the third of which was published posthumously. Masters died in 1986. 'A beautiful little book, written with great gentleness and warmth.' Courier Mail 'Olga Masters writes with freshness and brimming exuberance, and yet control over her material is absolute...Amy's Children is a polished, moving story, one that touches the very roots of being and feeling without the barest hint of cliche.' Age Amy's Children offers a delightfully wicked view of female values and culture.' Bulletin 'Masters' best work...[It] captures in photorealist detail the peeling facades of the inner city during the years when the Depression was supplanted by war...What makes this quiet novel so remarkable? Partly it is the language, as regular and minutely exact as Amy's aunt's hand-sewn buttonholes. But the real magic lies in the way such words are deployed...The sense of loss that pervades this final work is palpable.' Geordie Williamson