Food, Sex and Money
By Liz Byrski

Nominated in this year's Books Alive promotion, this is a story about three women renewing their friendship forty years after convent school.

Following the death of her husband, Bonnie moves back to Australia after decades in Europe. She soon realises that it will take more than adjusting the amount of make-up she wears to fit back in. Along with her friends Fran, a well known food writer, and Slvia, a minister's wife, she decides to open The Boatshed - a combined restuarant, gallery and shop. It's an enormous undertaking that has an unexpected impact on them and their families.

It is not only a novel written with remarkable insights and sensitivity, but is also a tribute to about three quarters of the female population of the planet, who are more than twenty-five years old. It is most satisfying that an excellent author had the courage to star women, who are over the proverbial hill, have been battered by losses, are anguished by the future, and caught between the problems of their adult children on one end, and the last struggles of their parents on the other. In a society besotted by youth, the majority of women cannot find many novels in which they do not feel excluded, ( or when included than mostly as ridiculous, or pitiable figures).