‘Loveland’

A Brisbane woman, May, inherits from her grandmother 24 acres and a lakeside house in Nebraska. Her name is the only pretty thing about May’s life. She is nearly 40 and working as a nanny to a child whose parents treat and pay her as a person from an underclass. She has been married since late teenage years to a controlling, nasty man, and her son, the one person she hoped would make her life redeemable, is becoming a copy of his father. But inheritance equals agency and the words “new start” flood her mind. She could leave her husband. May quits her job and books a flight to Nebraska, to the place called “Loveland”. The name is unintentionally sardonic.

Robert Lukins’ previous novel, his debut, The Everlasting Sunday, was concerned with male violence in a group of troubled adolescents. Set in England over the freezing winter of 1962, the landscape was as memorable...