Home

A story of homecoming, this absorbing novel opens with a young, city-based lawyer setting out on her first visit to ancestral country. Candice arrives at "the place where the rivers meet", the camp of the Eualeyai where in 1918 her grandmother Garibooli was abducted. As Garibooli takes up the story of Candice's Aboriginal family, the twentieth century falls away.

Garibooli, renamed Elizabeth, is sent to work as a housemaid, but marriage soon offers escape from the terror of the master's night-time visits. Her displacement carries into the lives of her seven children - their stories witness to the impact of orphanage life and the consequences of having a dark skin in post-war Australia. Vividly rekindled, the lives of her family point the direction home for Candice.

Home is a powerful and intelligent first novel from an author who understands both the capacity of language to suppress and the restorative potency of stories that bridge past and present.

Larissa Behrendt is Professor of Law and Indigenous Studies and Director of the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning at UTS. She graduated from UNSW Law School in 1992 and has since completed her Master of Laws and Doctorate at Harvard Law School. She is a practicing lawyer and lecturer and has worked with the United Nations. She is currently sitting on the Administrative Decisions Tribunal, the Serious Offenders Review Council, the AIATSIS Council, the ATSIC National Treaty Think Tank, the UTS Council, NSW Native Title Services and the NSW Aboriginal Justice Advisory Committee. She is published on property law, Indigenous rights, dispute resolution and Aboriginal women’s issues. \\\"Home\\\" is her first novel.