She approaches the delivery in much the same way she approaches the birth of the farm animals, and the prose is just as practical, without sentiment. Noah gives birth to the child alone and by a river. She is neglected by her alcoholic father and in the Preamble, the reader learns that ‘… in her fourteen-year-old womb a dead uncle’s baby grows …’. Noah, a fourteen-year-old girl whose mother died after birthing her, is as harsh and rugged as the world in which she is growing up. The novel is set in a fictional northern NSW town called Wirri. A love story of impossible beauty and sadness, it is also a chronicle of dreams ‘turned inside out’, and miracles that never last, framed against a world both tender and unspeakably hard.’ ‘Foal’s Bread ‘tells the story of two generations of the Nancarrow family and the high-jumping horse circuit prior to the Second World War. This is the summary from the Allen and Unwin website:
It won the 2012 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction, the 2012 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, and was short-listed for the 2012 Miles Franklin Award.
Foal’s Bread by Gillian Mears was published 2011.
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