Sharing some exciting news today! My unpublished manuscript #BURN has just been shortlisted in the Australian 'Banjo Prize' for fiction. Winner announced August 31, so fingers, toes and eyes are crossed ...

https://www.harpercollins.com.au/theb...

In the meantime, here is the blurb!

PLOT PRECIS

Set against the backdrop of a recent drought, thirteen year old Jill Murray and her twin sister Jenny see their father burn down their farmhouse rather than let it be repossessed by the bank. But he gets caught inside the house and dies in the fire.

Not wanting to see her husband’s death as pointless, their mother, Ellen, loads her husband’s coffin and the two girls on a horse-drawn wagon and determines to drive his body to the Parliament building in Melbourne to make a statement about the incredible pressure on farming families.

But Jill isn’t convinced her father’s death was an accident. He was a meticulous, detail-oriented man and she was with him as he walked step by step through the plan for burning their house down. She can’t believe he would have messed it up so badly, so the only other explanation is foul play. Her suspicions are still swirling as the family heads of out of town together with a motley assortment of townsfolk from Heywood for the week-long, two hundred mile journey to Melbourne.

The night before they leave town, someone burns down the local bank. It’s a pattern that repeats every time they pull into a new town – Torquay, Geelong, Queenscliff, Frankston. More towns, more banks, supermarkets, houses set ablaze. The police want to shut the protest down but it is attracting media attention now and gets solid legal support from a national media group to keep the police at bay. The police can’t prove anyone in the funeral cortege is the fire bomber, and there is no law against transporting a coffin in a horse and carriage. As media attention intensifies, more and more supporters attach themselves to the convoy. Ellen Murray emerges as a charismatic populist leader and her nightly addresses to the funeral followers attract a large social media following thanks in part to the social media skills of daughter Jenny in getting the message out.

Jill meanwhile keeps circling around the suspicious characters in the funeral cortege, determined to find out if one of them could be behind her father’s death. Then she learns that the local police in Lorne didn’t actually test the DNA of their father’s body, didn’t check the dental records against his and couldn’t check his fingerprints. They just seem to have presumed the dead man was him. Now Jill is struck by a new possibility – that the man in the coffin is not even their father. Could he be the firebomber?

Jill Robinson is a unique narrator and the story is told in the first person from her perspective. Jill and her twin sister have congenital analgesia, a rare but unfortunately real condition in which the affected child cannot cry, cannot sweat, and feels no physical pain. Pain (physical and emotional), and the ability to feel it or not, is the theme running throughout the novel as we see the two girls dealing with the shock and grief of the loss of their father, but unable to express it in tears. Unable to accept that his death was an accident, Jill deals with her pain by trying to prove he was murdered. Unable to show outwardly her grief at his death, she becomes determined to discover whether he is even dead at all.

As the funeral cortege finally pulls into Melbourne leaving a trail of fire, shock and grief in its wake, Jill Murray’s pain has reached a crescendo, but still, she cannot cry. Then inside the funeral chapel, their mother takes the girls aside. “I have something I need to tell you.”

amazon.com/author/timslee