Author(s): Pip Smith

Fiction

Wellington, 1885. Tally Ho doesn't need to go to school because she is going to be a fisherman or a cart driver or a butcher boy like Harry Crawford. Wellington is her town and she makes up the rules. Papa takes her fishing, Nonno teaches her how to jump fences on his horse Geronimo - life gallops on the way it should, until a brother, baby William is born. Go and play with your sisters, Papa says, but wearing dresses and sipping tea is not the life for Tally Ho. Taking her hero Harry Crawford's advice, she runs away. Sydney, 1917. A burned woman is discovered on the banks of the Lane Cove River. Was she a mad woman? A drunk who'd accidentally set herself on fire? Nobody knows, until- three years later-a tailor's apprentice tells police that his mother went missing that very same weekend, and his stepfather, Harry Crawford, is not who he seems to be. Who, then, is he? Sydney, 1938. After being hit by a car on Oxford Street, sixty-three-year-old Jean Ford lies in a coma in Sydney Hospital. Doctors talk across her body, nurses jab her in the arm with morphine, detectives arrive to take her fingerprints. Memories come back to her - of a life as a man, of life as a female prisoner - but they are always shifting and she can no longer tell the difference between what she did, what she said she did, and what other people believed she did. Based on the true story of Eugenia Falleni (alias Harry Crawford, alias Jean Ford), Half-Wild is a brilliant debut novel of true originality and power.