I love this book! Having been a young girl at the time of the Beaumont's disappearance in beachside Adelaide, I remember, it being school holidays (summer) leaning over the gate looking up and down the street, my suburb next to Glenelg Beach, looking for them! This book evoked the memories of those long hot summer days, living near the beach for me, but the suburbs in the book are where my mum grew up. I could breathe in every line and be transported back to that time. The early 1960s....I could read this book again and again. I have talked to people who read it who didn't feel overly excited about it. Maybe it is a nostalgia thing but I couldn't put it down. Stephen Orr is an amazing evocative writer. The story is disturbing but only too familiar in Adelaide at that time. ( )

I put off reading this book. Despite its inclusion in the longlist for the 2011 Miles Franklin Award and regional shortlist for the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, I feared it would be like the execrable Room and I don’t much like the idea of novelists mining the pain of celebrity victims for their books. For Time’s Long Ruin is loosely based on the disappearance of the Beaumont children in Adelaide in 1966, and their parents, if still living, would be in their eighties. They have, by all accounts, had enough of the publicity and speculation that has surrounded the tragedy of their loss, and I think there is no merit in pandering to ghoulish public curiosity about crime of any kind, much less this one.

Stephen Orr, however, has written a sensitive book, which has for me transformed the static grainy images of the lost children that have haunted the nation’s consciousness for forty years or more. In his novel they are real people, with individual personalities and the irrepressible charm of real children. For all of Part 1 Janice, Anna and Gavin Riley are neighbours and playmates to Henry, aged nine. In a carefree world that ended on Australia Day 1960 [1] they rejoice in the anarchy of street life, late hours and minimal parental supervision, free to roam in a now mythic Australian childhood.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/2011/04/25/times-long-ruin-by-stephen-orr/ ( )