BOOK LAUNCH: Iluka by Cassie Stroud

Join author Cassie Stroud and Laura Brading (Books Editor, Primer Magazine) for a night of conversation to celebrate the launch of Cassie's first novel, Iluka. A vivid, engrossing, beautifully crafted family drama that charts the hurtful messes, complicated relationships and profound loves of three siblings. N.B Arrival from 6pm for a 6.30pm start.

After their grandfather's death, siblings Helen, Sylvie and Brendan, and Helen's daughter, film student Tig, are gathered together at Iluka, a typical fibro beach house in a small town on the south coast. Iluka is the house they grew up in when their troubled mother ran away to the bright lights of the city, leaving their grandparents to raise them.

As they slowly clear the house for sale and relive various memories, they find a bundle of letters addressed to each of them from their missing mother, Marguerite, that were sent long after they'd been told she died.

Their world shifts on its axis, as the siblings begin to question everything they have been told. Why did their grandmother hide these letters? Was their grandfather complicit? And could the mother they thought they had lost still be alive?

Viewed through the unsparing eye of Tig's camera, we watch a family first implode then reform around a new reality, a reality that brings with it profound change in the way they view themselves and each other.

'Knife sharp perception ... fiction that is an absolute pleasure to read,' Emily Maguire, author

A millennial Anne Tyler, who chronicles family dynamics with precision and relatability. Absorbing, sophisticated and full of luminous insight, Iluka is an accomplished family saga.' Laura Brading, Books Editor, Primer Magazine