Salvation Creek

This rambling biography by Susan Duncan is a kind of sea-change book. She suffers the death of her brother and husband in the same week, soldiers on, breaks down, moves house, loses her cat and her dog, has a devastating affair with a married man, gets cancer – and then finds a house in Pittwater, or, more accurately, a community of people there. She makes friends, learns to live in the moment, and eventually falls in love and gets married. It’s well told, although it could be more cohesive, and her habit of giving away what’s going to happen in two years’ time, then not referring to it for chapters, is a bit irritating. Again, it’s about wealthy people and their lives – I suppose wealthy people are the ones who are free to make the changes and write the books. And there’s an enormous amount of alcohol – I never realised how much people drank. Too much about dogs, too. But very readable, even though it makes you realise that there must be a lot of people who wait too long to realise life is short, if there are so many books like this being published.