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  • Published: 6 March 2006
  • ISBN: 9780143002604
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $27.99

No Time For Dances



She let me go and disappeared . . . without a backward glance. And I, I turned away, sick at heart, but not knowing . . . that I had said goodbye to her forever.
Now I wish, as much as I have ever wished for anything . . . that I had been able to cage those precious minutes within the nets of gold I could not recognise as such. And that I had been somehow able to prolong those minutes into years.

Nine years ago, at the age of fifty. Gillian Bouras's sister, Jacqui, took her own life. Here Gillian explores what went so wrong in Jacqui's life and why her family and friends could not save her. She examines their shared childhood and their growth to womanhood and independence, picking apart the different threads of their lives, seeking answers and solace.
No Time For Dances is a frank, heartfelt, lyrical and compelling examination of the nature of grief and mental illness. It is also the story of a warm, delightful and fragile woman who lived much of her life in mental pain.

  • Published: 6 March 2006
  • ISBN: 9780143002604
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $27.99

About the author

Gillian Bouras

Gillian Bouras was born in Melbourne in 1945. She worked as a teacher in Australia before moving to Greece with her husband and children in 1980. She is the author of A Foreign Wife (1986), A Fair Exchange (1991), Aphrodite and the Others (1994), A Stranger Here (1996) and Starting Again (1999), all published by Penguin, and all dealing with her experiences as an Australian woman in Greece. She has also produced a novel for children, Saving Christmas, and her shorter pieces continue to be widely published.

Awards & recognition

National Biography Award

Shortlisted  •  2007  •  Autobiography/biography