Narrator not specified

Lily works as a cleaner. She moves through houses in inner-city Melbourne, unseen, scrubbing away the daily residue of other people's privilege. Her partner Janks works the line in a local food factory. With every pay cheque they inch further away from their former world of poverty and addiction.Lily and Janks are determined that their daughter Jewelee will have a different life. She'll have a career, not a dead-end job. She'll have savings, not debt. But precarious lives are easily upended. One wrong move throws the family into a situation in which the lines between right and wrong, hope and disappointment, are blurred.Other Houses is a masterful and tender story about people who live from payday to payday. Acutely observed and lyrical, Paddy O'Reilly's novel paints a haunting picture of class, aspiration and the boundaries we will cross for love.'The tension of a thriller but the freshness and acuity of art.' CHARLOTTE WOOD'A bracing story of a woman tending to the households of strangers while her own runs towards catastrophe.' JOSEPHINE ROWE

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