SHARDS OF US

Ruth had her life mapped out - a wedding, a house, a family of her own - until her fiancé broke it off a week before the big day. Reeling and single at thirty-five, she never expected to fall for the one man who was completely off-limits: Lachlan, the husband of her friend Heather.

The affair was reckless, secret, and utterly consuming - until a child's innocent slip of the tongue exposed everything. In the fallout, Heather, who had been fighting a private battle no one around her fully understood, took her own life. Ruth lost far more than her lover that year. She lost her closest friends, her community, the baby she was carrying, and any right to grieve out loud.

Ten years on, Ruth exists rather than lives, back in her childhood home nursing a mother who finds fault with everything from her hair to her choices, going through the motions of a life that stalled the night Heather died. But when circumstance drags her back into contact with the friends who cut her off, Ruth is finally forced to face what happened that year - and to ask herself whether she deserves the second chance now standing in front of her.

Moving between the reckless choices of the past and the slow, hard-won healing of the present, Shards of Us is an emotionally raw novel about the collateral damage of infidelity, the messy work of forgiveness, and the courage it takes to gather up the broken pieces of a life and build something whole again. Fans of dual-timeline, family-driven women's fiction will find themselves torn between judging Ruth and rooting for her redemption, right up to the very last page.