Forget the blokes

These are both second novels by previously successful authors. Each has an atmospheric sense of place and a dominant female figure. In Beyond the Break, it is the flamboyant and dangerous Irene. In Out of Place, the matriarch Eve, a postwar Italian migrant, keeps her family together through her insistence upon the traditions and the healing rituals of the old world, including especially the cooking.

Sandra Hall is an experienced journalist and film critic for the Sydney Morning Herald. Beyond the Break is a Sydney book, full of seductive and changing images of city and surf. The surf-side suburbs – Coogee, Cronulla, and Maroubra – are captured at a time when the most one could fear was a shark attack or a rip that would take the swimmer out ‘beyond the break’; never a race riot. Against the hedonistic beachside lifestyle of the 1950s and 1960s, the novel traces the dynamic relationship between two teenage girls, Annie and Steph; their too-close friendship, their rivalry and the accompanying tensions. Moving to the forthright 1980s, it traces their matings and partings, and their occasional professional successes. Meanwhile, contrasting episodes set in a more vigorous and competitive New York offer a fresh perspective on the Sydney scene.