I Came To Say Goodbye
By (Author) Caroline Overington
Transworld Publishers (Division of Random House Australia)
Bantam
1st September 2011
Australia
General
Fiction
A823.40
Paperback
336
Width 127mm, Height 194mm, Spine 23mm
268g
It was four o'clock in the morning. A young woman pushed through the hospital doors. Staff would later say they thought the woman was a new mother, returning to her child - and in a way, she was. She walked into the nursery, where a baby girl lay sleeping. The infant didn't wake when the woman placed her gently in the shopping bag she had brought with her. There is CCTV footage of what happened next, and most Australians would have seen it, either on the internet or the news. The woman walked out to the car park, towards an old Corolla. For a moment, she held the child gently against her breast and, with her eyes closed, she smelled her. She then clipped the infant into the car, got in and drove off. That is where the footage ends. It isn't where the story ends, however. It's not even where the story starts.
Caroline Overington is the author of two non-fiction books, Only in New York and Kickback, which won the Blake Dawson Prize for Business Literature. She has twice won a Walkley Award for Investigative Journalism, and has also won the Sir Keith Murdoch Award for Journalistic Excellence. She has written four novels- Ghost Child, I Came to Say Goodbye, Matilda is Missing and Sisters of Mercy (out November 2012). She lives in Bondi with her husband and their young twins.