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  • Published: 30 March 2009
  • ISBN: 9781742530116
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 216

Sugar Mother



'Her warmest novel, her most moving and possibly the best introduction to her fiction'
New York Times Book Review

Edwin Page, an aging but handsome university professor, is married to Cecilia, a young obstetrician who delivers babies every day but doesn't have children of her own. When work takes Cecilia overseas, Edwin begins an unlikely friendship with 22-year-old Leila and her mother who have moved in next door.  As each month passes, Cecilia seems further away, and Edwin's desire for a child meets little resistance from Leila, who is perfectly willing to play surrogate mother - in more ways than one.

The Sugar Mother
explores the way the many little impacts of distance, separation and change can gather force and move people in unexpected directions.  It is a delicate and disturbing story of self-deception and secret hopes.

  • Published: 30 March 2009
  • ISBN: 9781742530116
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 216

About the author

Elizabeth Jolley

Elizabeth Jolley was one of Australia's most celebrated writers, with a formidable international reputation. She was recognised in Australia with an AO for services to literature and was awarded Honorary Doctorates from Curtin University (1986); Macquarie (1995), Queensland (1997) and The University of New South Wales (2000).

Born in England in 1923, she was brought up in a strict, German-speaking household and attended a Quaker boarding school. She became a nurse, married Leonard Jolley and with three children moved to Western Australia in 1959. In 1974 she started teaching creative writing at Fremantle Arts Centre.

Although she wrote all her life, it was not until she was in her fifties that her books started to receive the recognition they deserved. She won The Age Book of the Year Award on three separate occasions (for Mr Scobie's Riddle, My Father's Moon and The Georges' Wife) and she won the Miles Franklin Award for The Well, as well as many other awards. Her last two novels published by Penguin were An Accommodating Spouse (1999) and An Innocent Gentleman (2001). Her non-fiction collection, Learning to Dance was published in 2006.

Elizabeth Jolley died in 2007.

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