Slowly, Lucy Ann

Sixteen-year-old Lucy Ann loves the smell of rain.

She loves the chime of coins in her phone's daily game, the first segment of an orange stolen from her mother's fingers, and the last page of Fishing Boat Singing at Dusk, the shimmering tremolo she has never once played right.

Now she lies in a hospital bed in Singapore while the monsoon runs down the window, and the people who love her keep watch: a mother who peels an orange every afternoon for a daughter who can't eat it, a father who has never sung a note in his life, a little brother doing his maths out loud, and a best friend who logs in every day so Lucy Ann's streak won't break.

Ten months earlier, she was just tired.

Moving between the quiet of the hospital room and the year that led there, Slowly, Lucy Ann is a novel about a girl who learns to hold on to small things - rain on her open palms, prata at midnight, the woman in the purple cap in the next chair - and about the family and friends who learn, slowly, how to let her go.

For readers who love tender, heartbreaking stories about family, friendship and the beauty of ordinary days, this is a book to read slowly, and remember for a long time.

A gentle note: this novel explores serious illness and loss.