Merlene Fawdry

Women of the Cataract Merlene Fawdry

Launceston's iconic Caretaker's Cottage, nestled into the rock face overlooking the South Esk River, is the perfect setting for an Artists and Writers in Residence Program. For Clare Towns it offers a new beginning and a means of escaping Levi, a cyber stalker with a narcissistic personality disorder who has shadowed her for the past six years. Re-inventing herself as Frances Ashbury, writer, poet and blogger, she moves to the cottage to research the novel she's been writing in her mind for almost a decade. However, despite its peaceful façade, she discovers the cottage is occupied by the restless spirits of women and children who have died in the river over the previous hundred and fifty years, a living history that intrudes on her days and fills her nights with confusion, until she is unable to separate the past from the present. They are relying on her to set them free, she trusts them to save her when Levi tracks her down, while the cottage conspires to claim her as one the Women of the Cataract.