Digging to Australia: A Novel

A lonely twelve-year-old fantasizes about escaping her dysfunctional family by digging a tunnel to the other side of the world

Shy, lonely Jennifer Maybee lives with her weird, left-wing parents in a house where daily morning exercises are done in the buff and television is forbidden. She has few friends and spends most of her time alone. Her favorite book is Alice in Wonderland. A story about a distant ancestor who was transported to Australia on a convict ship for stealing a peacock sets her imagination humming, and soon Jennifer is digging a tunnel in her garden to burrow through to that exotic country. But a shocking revelation will shatter everything she believed about her parents—and herself.
 
Desperate to escape her unhappy life, Jennifer makes a new friend, Brownyn Broom, whose father was murdered. But it’s her encounter with a strange-eyed man in an abandoned church that sets Jennifer hurtling headlong into Alice’s “topsy-turvy land”—a sinister, secret world not even Lewis Carroll could have dreamed up.
 
Lesley Glaister masterfully weaves a chilling mystery of a young girl coming of age and confronting the world around her.