Skimming Stones

In 2020 Skimming Stones won the City of Fremantle Hungerford Award. It’s a novel that took me about 6 years to write (slightly more if you count all the early research and thinking).

Set in a paediatric oncology ward and at Lake Clifton in Australia’s southwest, Skimming Stones is about a nurse named Grace, who on the one hand cares for and guides her young patients, but on the other must navigate her own past as a child who once bore witness to her sister’s leukaemia.

Skimming Stones explores the lifelong effects of childhood illness and trauma. It’s a novel about families, and the ways people within these families love and break until finally they begin to recognise what they have all been through.

This is a novel for readers who want to be swept away in a character’s life, who don’t mind reading for emotional release, but who also look for hope. Ultimately, Skimming Stones will remind you of the power of human connection.

Publisher’s blurb…

Grace first met her lover, Nate, as a teenager, their bond forged in the corridors and waiting rooms where siblings of cancer patients sit on the sidelines. Now an adult, for Grace, nursing is a comforting world of science and certainty. But the paediatric ward is also a place of miracles and heartbreak and, when faced with a dramatic emergency, Grace is confronted with memories of her sister’s illness. Heading south to Lake Clifton and the haunts of her childhood, Grace discovers that a stone cast across a lake sends out ripples long after the stone has gone.