'Silence, Chris discovered, is easy. If nobody asks, you never have to tell.'
Christopher Bright is a well-respected conservation architect, good neighbour and friend. He has a devoted wife, two talented children and an old Rover. He plays tennis on Saturdays and enjoys a beer with his business partner after work.
Life is orderly, yet an unresolved question has haunted him for as long as he can remember: Who was his birth father?
Devotion to his adoptive parents has always prevented Chris from enquiring too deeply, but when his mother dies, information emerges that becomes the catalyst for changes he has never imagined.
As light is cast on his father, attention turns to his birth mother, but when he goes in search of the person behind the photo, he encounters a conspiracy of silence. His quest for information, however, reveals not only the truth about his mother's life but exposes the fault lines in his own, and Chris finds the price of knowledge increasingly heavy. Nevertheless, the truth must be told ...
Or must it?
Author Information
Annah Faulkner's debut novel, The Beloved, won the Queensland Premier's Literary Award for an Emerging Queensland Author in 2011. It was commended for the FAW Christina Stead Award, won the Kibble Literary Award and was shortlisted for the 2013 Miles Franklin Award. It also won the Marian Eldridge Award for Australian Women Writers and the Varuna/Macquarie Bank Longlines Award. And later it was shortlisted for two publisher fellowships (Hachette and Penguin) and in 2011, it was awarded a Varuna/Pan Macmillan publisher fellowship.
Her study and work in Traditional Chinese Medicine reignited her passion for writing and in 2000, she wrote and published a short humorous biography, Frankly Speaking.
Encouraged her success, Annah penned a more serious work, The Blood of Others, a 5000-word story which was published in 2007 by Antipodes, the North American Journal of Australian Literature.
Annah and her husband divided their time between Queensland's Sunshine Coast and beautiful Tasmania. Her second novel, Last Day in the Dynamite Factory, was published by Picador in July 2015.
Annah past in March 2022.