Digging to Australia

**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.