Gripping, insightful and moving, This Picture of You is a searing story of love and betrayal. A portrait of a family and the history that threatens to tear it apart at the seams. A breakthrough novel from one of the rising stars of Australian writing, Sarah Hopkins.
Martin and Maggie, a judge and an artist, have forged a life together for thirty-seven years. They have a son who is a successful lawyer and a grandson to dote on. Life is good, comfortable, familiar.
But one day Martin leaves a family lunch and drives to a suburb miles away, to a particular house in a particular street, where an accident triggers a chain of events. No one knows why he was there – not even Martin himself – and as his mind starts unravelling, it is left to Maggie to discover what in Martin’s past is troubling him, and where it is going to take them.
While Maggie pieces together the events leading up to the accident, Martin takes refuge in a single memory, a night in New York almost forty years ago – the night he and Maggie met. As Martin’s mind spirals inward, the fabric that has been holding his lifetime of secrets at bay begins to fray. In his efforts to protect his family from the mistakes in his past, has Martin damned his son to the fate of repeating them?
Sarah Hopkins is the author of two previous novels, The Crimes of Billy Fish, which was highly commended in the inaugural ABC Fiction Awards and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and Speak to Me. Sarah is a criminal lawyer and lives in Sydney.
This Picture of You is published by Allen & Unwin and is available from all leading book retailers including Bookworld.
Image: This Picture of You – Sarah Hopkins