Rosalie Ham · 2000 · road

Rosalie Ham's 2000 debut, a gothic comedy about haute couture and revenge. Tilly Dunnage was sent away from a Victorian wheatbelt town at the age of ten, accused of a murder she has no memory of. Twenty-five years later she comes back from Paris with a Singer sewing machine to look after her mother, and the town lines up to be dressed by her.

1. 1
   Dungatar

   A town Ham places in the Wimmera-Mallee wheat country, on a hill. In 1926 a boy dies at the school and a ten-year-old girl is blamed and put on a train out - and the sergeant who sends her away is the only one being kind.

2. 2
   Melbourne

   Sent first to the city and then further, a country child in an institution learning the one thing she turns out to be extraordinary at - and getting steadily further from the town without ever quite leaving it.

3. 3
   Paris

   Trained by Madeleine Vionnet, the couturier who invented the bias cut - which is why the frocks that come back to Dungatar do things to the local women that nobody in the district can account for.

4. 4
   Dungatar

   Back in 1951 to a mother who does not recognise her, and a town that takes her dressmaking and keeps its opinion - and when the rest of it plays out, Tilly leaves it burning behind her and does not look round.

5. 5
   Melbourne

   She goes back to the city on the train she was put on as a child, this time by choice - the book having spent three hundred pages arranging for that symmetry, and not being coy about enjoying it.