Amy's Children

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Abandoned by her feckless husband during the Depression, Amy decides to leave her country town and her three infant children to try her luck in the big smoke. Life in wartime Sydney is far from easy, but for Amy there are the hard-won satisfactions of an office job and a house of her own. Until her eldest, Kathleen, appears needing a home while she attends high school. And Amy falls in love with a married man...Olga Masters' second and last novel is a triumph. At its centre is Amy, one of the great characters in Australian literature.

Reviews

'A beautiful little book, written with great gentleness and warmth.' Courier Mail 'Olga Masters writes with freshness and brimming exuberance, and yet control over her material is absolute...Amy's Children is a polished, moving story, one that touches the very roots of being and feeling without the barest hint of cliche.' -- John Carroll Age 'Amy's Children offers a delightfully wicked view of female values and culture.' Bulletin 'In Amy's Children Masters has changed her background from rural to urban without changing her essential territory-the intense and private lives of women and girls.' Adelaide Advertiser 'Masters' best work...[It] captures in photorealist detail the peeling facades of the inner city during the years when the Depression was supplanted by war...What makes this quiet novel so remarkable Partly it is the language, as regular and minutely exact as Amy's aunt's hand-sewn buttonholes. But the real magic lies in the way such words are deployed...The sense of loss that pervades this final work is palpable.' -- Geordie Williamson 'Polished, subtle and sustained. A classic Australian novel.' -- Eva Hornung 'The women whose small lives are chronicles here might be described as protofeminists...each is absorbed in making her own way in the world. Masters' orchestration of this theme is superb.' Kirkus Reviews

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