Their mother takes a wrong turn as she drives out of the southern New South Wales country town of Hay. As she spins the wheel there is no way of knowing that this is a bend in their lives, a fatal kink. Theo monitors the flutter of his mother's hands crossing and re-crossing the steering wheel before they are all thrown sideways - it is the distracting move of a magician, or of a bullfighter twirling the red cape. December, 1963: widowed cafe owner Stella Madigan, with her two young children Fran and Theo, and the free-spirited artist Mardi Rose, embark on a road trip to Byron Bay. But a night spent in the tiny outback town of Temperance will alter all their lives, and ignite a chain of events the children will struggle to both conceal and resolve, long into adulthood. Temperance explores the discrepancies between what children see and what adults allow them to believe. Its mystery unravels against a background of early 1960s Australia, where religious wars are fought in suburban living rooms, and feminism has made so little headway that a relationship between two women can be seen as perverse, even dangerous. This haunting novel vividly inhabits its suburban beachside setting, while sensitively exploring through its characters the corrosive effects of ambiguous loss, and of tightly held family secrets.