'She lay back on the mattress, unable to sleep for love, listening to his breathing, night birds calling outside like ghosts, the faint, wild cracking of the palms. She had never felt so comforted by one single thing before, his presence there, his quiet breathing in the room . . .'
In the summer that she turns seventeen Grace comes to the threshold of a world full of richness and danger, love and loss, innocence and exploitation. That summer Grace spends a lot of time dreaming, watched by her mother, the once beautiful Mara, who has become an acid-tongued, dissolute drunkard, and Porora, the fierce Rarotongan matriarch who runs the Paradise Bar where Grace works.
Set on a beautiful Pacific Island, this book is about first love. It is a fresh, sensual and bitter-sweet story, as evocative as a Gauguin painting.
