Firehead

Love, blood and pasta over three decades in Brisbane. She used to sell her kisses for caramels; her lips went for long licks of liquorice and her touch for tangerines and tutti frutti. She looked as Irish as rain out of a sunny blue day and as English as green meadows where wildflowers grow, and her name was Gabriella Maria Santuzza Zazo. When Gabriella moves in next door to 14-year-old Sam with her parents and her ageing grandfather - a man who carries the secrets of their Mediterranean island inside his slowly darkening mind - Sam knows that his life will never be the same. Set in Brisbane's Sicilian community over three decades, from 1975 to 1995, Firehead is an eerie story of generations of love, of police corruption and a city's changing terrain, and of searching for one place in the world you can finally say is home. This is sensuous, compelling storytelling with an aching mystery at its heart.