THE PASSENGERS

Tender, smart grandmothergranddaughter discovery journey. Widow Sarah returns to native Australia from California on a cruise ship with Hannah, who is hiding an eating disorder as she starves herself on this rolling eaterie where everyone is either “overfed or nearly dead”. Sarah misses nothing. She observes that Hannah has not known wartime - “when death is close, you have to live” - and hence her own rushed marriage to “yank” soldier Roy in Sydney, his posting to Guinea and her following him to Virginia in 1945. Back home on his family farm, wounded Roy was not the man she married.