What Remains

About the Book

The O’Hara family has lived on Lake Road for generations—since 1825, in fact. Their fates have been as varied as the lake’s depths, but 1975 was a pivotal time in the life of the family. It was the year that Lily O’Hara was born and her mother, Moya, and brother, Brannen, disappeared. It was assumed that the two had drowned, but the bodies were never recovered. Her father, Cillian, could offer no explanation for the disappearance of his wife and son. The police and locals believed he was guilty of murder, but without bodies no charges could be laid. The young father attempted to raise his baby daughter with the help of his unmarried brother and sister, Darcy and Billie. The weight of loss and presumed guilt drove Cillian to take his own life when Lily was only nine months old. The novel commences with twenty-six-year-old Lily watching the now diminishing lake and thinking about her life. She tries to avoid dwelling on her family’s demise. Billie and Darcy are now dead, and she knows little about the events from 1975. But the past can never be truly silenced, and the noise of those terrible losses roars back to life when bones are discovered in the drying mud of the now-empty lake. Lily is an archivist and curator. In her working life she makes sense of the past lives of other people by assigning meaning to the artefacts they leave behind. It becomes her mission to make sense of her father’s actions by examining what evidence remains. She will also come to accept that she, like all of us, has been shaped by the past. She must decide if she will be consumed or strengthened by what she finds out.

About the Author

Tracey grew up in the regional city of Launceston in Tasmania, the beautiful island state in Southern Australia. After graduating from university, she started a very rewarding teaching career, which has spanned thirty-two years. She has been married to her husband, Greg, for twenty-six years and is the mother of two adult children, Ellen and Patrick. While living in Hobart, she was a founding member of a writing group called the Aphorism Club. The writers published an anthology of their work in 1999. The group and the work they explored during those years remains an important part of her development as a fiction writer. In 2005, Tracey completed a master’s in creative writing at the University of Canberra. Both her teaching and writing are influenced by an appreciation of what motivates human behaviour, what maintains equilibrium, and how we cope with the disturbances that threaten that balance. Tracey predominantly writes adult fiction that reflects on ordinary people responding to extraordinary events. In 2015, Tracey and Greg moved from Canberra to the south coast of New South Wales. The milder weather and beautiful beach environment have been most conducive to fulfilling a life’s ambition to publish further work.