Thursday's Child

TRADE EDITION: The creature held a great bundle of something tied up in a rag. For a moment we stared, not recognising him, but who else could it have been, who else but wandering Tin. We saw his naked limbs, his waxy skin, his discoloured hair, his hooking razor-sharp nails. He raised lashy eyes to us and we saw a face on its way to another world. Da murmured, 'Jesus.' Through the long years of the Great Depression, Harper Flute watches with a child's clear eyes her family's struggle to survive in a hot and impoverished landscape. As life on the surface grows harsher, her brother Tin escapes ever deeper into a subterranean world of darkness and troubling secrets, until his memory becomes a myth barely whispered around the countryside.