Window Gods

Sally Morrison is the author of Mad Meg, which won the Banjo Award from the Australian National Book Council in 1995. Window Gods is her later novel, a wide-ranging story about the demands placed on women, the balancing act of caring for others while keeping a sense of self, and the difficult work of mothering. It asks how a scattered life can be gathered into something whole.

Isobel is fifty-six and an artist who has trouble getting close to her subject. Her days are crowded with an elderly mother, her son, and the daughter of her late sister, whom she is raising. A lawsuit brought by her half sister arrives at the same time as her husband's cancer diagnosis, and one crisis follows another. Then her son vanishes in Afghanistan. Isobel travels there to search for him, a quest the novel frames as a kind of global Middlemarch. Along the way she leaves her failing mother behind and discovers strength in new friendships in an unfamiliar place.

Isobel returns home at the start of bushfire season to spend her mother's final, often darkly funny, days as the older woman readies herself for death. The book is about family, inheritance and change, and about finding your footing when no single authority or inherited faith holds the answers. Its observations on life, death and what lies between are sharp and often wry, offering a funny, intelligent portrait of contemporary life in all its messiness.