When Is Forever?

Forget chick lit. In this delightful, wry portrayal of life with young children, the pitfalls and pleasures of grandparenting are explored. Accommodating those young parents who were once one's children, and their children, while maintaining a sense of self, is a skill. These interlinked stories covering three years in the life of toddlers Jack and Serena and their extended family light up the pages. Each character is deftly drawn against the backdrop of everyday situations, and taps the nuances of relationships, sometimes painful, often joyful, and everything in between. Historian Sarah Martin of Melbourne, Australia, took time out from working on her Ph.D. to explore her creative muse. The result is this lighthearted fictional insight into middle-class suburban Australia, in which the voices of four generations come together in a subtle and textured comment on family life. Her biography of Davis McCaughey: A Life was published by UNSW Press Australia in 2012. Her history of the organisation Bush Heritage Australia and her first children's picture book A Galapagos Day will be published in 2016. She says, When my father died at the age of 99, he left his body to the School of Anatomy at the University of Melbourne. I had an interesting conversation with my daughter, who found it difficult to explain this concept to her three-year-old son. I started fiddling around with the kind of conversation that might ensue over the subject, and gradually the character Jack came into existence and spawned a whole cast of characters and events that eventually became When is Forever? Publisher's website: http://sbprabooks.com/SarahMartin