Barbara E Knight – författare

At the age of 80, Marion has seen the world change.

It is 2070. Climate change and soaring oil prices have taken their toll. Some countries have adjusted and prospered, while others have sunk into poverty and internal warfare.

Marion has seen Australia change from a free democracy to a repressive society ruled by an autocratic Muslim despot. 

She has watched how women have disappeared from the workplace and discovered what can befall women who no longer have a man to protect them. 

How these changes came about are revealed through Marion''s journal, as she writes during what may be the last days of her life.

I was a child of the forties in Tasmania.

This was a time of war and rationing. We wore handmade clothes and played with handmade toys. Schools were forbidding places with cold dreary classrooms, regimented lessons and too many kids crammed in.

Despite all this I had a joyous childhood growing up in a large and loving family. We lived surrounded by a wonderland of places in which to play. My siblings and I roamed free, wandering through bush, climbing trees and making cubbies.

We spent the school holidays at the shack near a beautiful, isolated beach. Here we swam, played and at night feasted on fresh fish round a campfire. 

Family, friends, freedom and fun are all here in the collected recollections of my life as a Free Range Kid.

This novel follows the lives of three women through the decades from the twenties to the turn of the century and explores the changes that have occurred in both the expectations and experiences of women during these decades.

There is Alice, a fun-loving flapper of the twenties, who marries Robert during the Depression years.  She faces the difficulties of feeding and clothing her growing family during the years of war and resultant rationing but basically is happy in her life''s role as a wife and mother.

Their third daughter Liz marries charismatic, ambitious Rod and gives up her teaching position when she becomes pregnant with their first child. She is a dependent wife and mother during the fifties and sixties but leaves the marriage to begin a new life of self-sufficiency in the country with a new love.

Helen is her daughter and is quite seriously affected by her parent''s divorce. As she matures she becomes typical of the young women of her generation, in that she sees sexual freedom, independence and equality at work and in relationships as her right.

A major theme is the importance the preparation and serving of food is in the lives of women and how shared meals are so much a part of celebratory times in one''s life. Many aspects of food preparation are covered including the difficulty of providing nourishing family meals when many food items are rationed, the fun of entertaining friends and family and the sharing of meals, the challenge of growing and collecting food as part of a self-sustainable lifestyle.

This novel is contemporary women''s fiction with a slightly paranormal twist, and is based on the concept that a parallel world is created when one makes a significant, life-changing decision.

It explores the lives of the three main characters, Jenny, Emma and Sonya, and then switches to a parallel world.

At the beginning of the novel the three women are enjoying a girls'' night out. They are all teachers in their mid-thirties, and have been friends for many years.

During the evening they discuss an article Sonya has read about decision-making and the creation of parallel worlds. She is open to the idea because she once experienced a brief, "other life," event, and has often been haunted by realistic dreams of living other lives.

Emma, a cynical realist, scoffs at the idea, but Jenny, a more sensitive soul, has had feelings of déjà vu and finds it thought provoking.

After they part, the thoughts and emotions evoked by their discussion leads each one to re-examine her past. Through their recollections, their lives unfold from childhood to the present. For each woman an important decision, made when quite young, determined the life she now leads and the woman she has become.

The second part of the novel is set in a parallel world, created when the women made other choices. In this world their lives and personalities are different, but despite their changed circumstances a strong, supportive friendship once more develops between them.

At the end there is a return to the first world. It is one year later, and for one of them there has been a "bleed" between the worlds.

The novel should appeal to all who have asked themselves, "what if?" about choices made in the past; and isn''t that all of us?