From its wonderfully atmospheric opening to its touching conclusion, this is a heartbreaking story, beautifully told' Literary Review From the winner of the Man Booker Prize. One of the most-loved and biggest-selling literary novels in Australian history. In the winter of 1954, in a construction camp in the remote Tasmanian highlands, when Sonja Buloh was three years old and her father was drinking too much, Sonja's mother walked into a blizzard never to return. Some thirty-five years later, when Sonja visits Tasmania and her drunkard father, the shadows of the past begin to intrude ever more forcefully into the present - changing forever his living death and her ordered life.