International IMPAC DUBLIN Literary Award 2002

Books nominated for the 2002 Award

For years, James Edward Phillips kept his wife and children in the dark about his past. On the few occasions when he made some reference to his early life, he spoke as though he had emerged into history at the age of six when someone in London had packed his belongings in a little wooden box and put him on a train to Bristol.
When her father dies, Louie discovers that she didn't know him at all. Suddenly there are people claiming to be relatives, people Louie and her sister have never heard of, people who knew their father very well indeed.
What was her father's secret? Why would anyone have hidden a whole other life, decade after decade? As Louie researches life in the gas-lit streets of Victorian London to find the truth about her father's family, she takes the scant facts she can gather and imagines what really happened into a story of her own: a story of better instincts corrupted by circumstance, of rending betrayals, blinding passion and love lost; a story which will reveal as much about the present as the past.

Margaret Scott was born in Bristol, England in 1934. After reading English at Cambridge, she worked at various jobs before emigrating to Tasmania, Australia with her husband and son. For twenty-four years she taught in the English Department of the University of Tasmania, retiring in 1989 to become a full-time writer. She has produced 4 books of poetry: Tricks of Memory, Visited, The Black Swans and Collected Poems; a novel, The Baby Farmer, and a collection of stories, essays and poems, Changing Countries. With Vivian Smith, she edited Effects of Light: The Poetry of Tasmania. In 1997 she wrote Port Arthur: A Story of Strength and Courage in response to the massacre which took place there in 1996. She has also written numerous articles, poems and short stories for periodicals in Australia, New Zealand, UK and the US.

Family Album	Nominated ISBN: 0091841798	Find out more about the author on the following websites:
by
Margaret Scott

Nominated by:
State Library of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia

Books nominated for the 2002 Award
Book Information	Click here for the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors