The Heart is a Star

Layla Byrnes is exhausted. She’s juggling a demanding job as an anaesthetist, a disintegrating marriage, her young kids, and a needy lover. And most particularly she’s managing her histrionically unstable mother, who repeatedly threatens to kill herself.

But this year, it’s different. When her mother rings just before Christmas, she doesn’t follow the usual script. Instead, she tells Layla that there’s something she needs to tell her about her much-loved father.

In response, Layla drops everything to rush to her childhood home on the wild west coast of Tasmania. She’s determined to finally confront her mother—and find out what really happened to her father—and lay some demons to rest.

Lyrical, vivid and compulsively readable, The Heart is a Star is a powerfully engrossing novel about the complicated and beautiful messiness of midlife; about the ways in which we navigate an intricate, complicated world; and about how we can only uncover our true selves when we are forced to face the myths that make us.

“Powerful, lyrical … I was enthralled by its physical and emotional landscapes and compelled by its dark mysteries."—Lee Kofman, The Writer Laid Bare