Much Ado About Maddie

In late-1960s Australia, thirteen-year-old orphan Madeline "Maddie" Piedmont is sent to live with her mother's sister and steps into a family still poisoned by old wounds. Behind the polite faces and carefully guarded secrets lies a scandal that once destroyed a young woman, tore a family apart, and left Maddie's own parents disowned and despised. As shy cousin Simon fights to silence a lifelong stutter and sharp-tongued Edith sheds her "Didiot" ways, Maddie begins to find a fragile place among them. But her grandmother has never forgiven the Piedmont name. Quietly, deliberately, she sets a predator on Maddie's trail: Jason Sturrock, the charming, amoral son of a corrupt politician. Warned never to be alone with him, Maddie and her cousins keep careful watch for years. Then one day, after a glittering awards show and a bitter argument, the careful circle breaks for the first time. Jason seizes his chance. Stripped of safety, vulnerable and alone, Maddie follows a strange, flickering light into the bush...and into the path of a kind artist named Bill Shakespeare. Under the rising psychedelic sky of a new age, among market stalls, painted vans, and the approaching Aquarius Festival, she begins the long process of healing. Yet the man who tried to break her is still free, and the past is not finished with any of them. Will love, found in the most unexpected place, be strong enough to cast out the shadows or will everything unravel like a dream with the new dawn?