A gripping and beautifully written novel in the tradition of Elizabeth is Missing and the work of Elizabeth Harrower

Alice Haywood is born on an orange farm in country New South Wales. She begins playing the piano when she is three, taught by her English mother who is unhappy in Australia and in a desolate, violent marriage. When Alice is seven, her mother, desperate for her daughter to leave if she can't, sends her to boarding school in the bleak north of England, and there Alice stays for the next ten years. Then she's offered a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London.

That year, on a summer school in Oxford, she meets Edward, an economics professor, who sweeps her off her feet.  But underneath his suave demeanor, Edward is a damaged man. He traps her into marriage and Alice is stuck, oppressed by his cruelty, in the Oxford home he has bought for her. After a disastrous recital of Rachmaninoff's Second Concerto, she stops playing and her dreams of becoming a concert pianist evaporate.  Alice and Edward have a son, Richard, whom she adores. He too is a talented musician.

But as Richard grows up he becomes more and more distant, and ultimately Alice can't find it in herself to carry on. Then she starts to hear the most beautiful music coming from the walls of her house.  Inspiring and unusual, this novel's love story is that of a woman who must embrace life again if she is to survive. With a wonderful cast led by Alice, the novel explores the dark terrain of violence and the transformative powers of music, and love.

Winner of the Readings Prize for New Austalian Fiction 2016

Michael, an aspiring writer who has recently finished his PhD, takes a job as the secretary to his literary hero, Lucian Clarke, a reclusive novelist with a mysterious cosmopolitan past, who lives in a cottage in a village on a mountain outside Hobart which gives the book its title, Wood Green.

Peopled by an ensemble cast, the local publican the single mother who manages the pub’s kitchen, the unhappily married couple that runs the corner store, a newcomer from Johannesburg with a murky past, a snivelling B&B proprietor and a determined ex-girlfriend, Wood Green artfully evokes the claustrophobia of small-town life.

While Michael believes he is making a new life for himself, Lucian has other plans. Rabin writes with wit and intelligence – and deftly executes an unsuspected plot twist – in his exploration of the perils of literary ambition and the elusive prospect of artistic legacy.