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Fiction
by Gillian Dooley
April 2010, no. 320

Time’s Long Ruin by Stephen Orr

Wakefield Press, $24.95 pb, 432 pp

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Lost children appear (or disappear) everywhere in literature and film: in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002) and Clint Eastwood’s Changeling (2008). Wendy James’s new novel, Where Have You Been?, concerns a lost teenager, and Carmel Bird’s Child of the Twilight (which I reviewed in last month’s ABR) explores the mythic status of the lost child. However, Stephen Orr’s novel Time’s Long Ruin goes to the harrowing core of one of the most disturbing mysteries in twentieth-century Australia – the disappearance of the Beaumont children.

 


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Time’s Long Ruin by Stephen Orr

Wakefield Press, $24.95 pb, 432 pp

ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.


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