Sad, moving, and incredibly powerful novel - The Restorer - is one you will definitely enjoy reading.

Here we find Maryanne returning to her husband after being apart for a year. The family including their eight-year-old son Daniel and teenage sister Freya move into a derelict home on the coast of Newcastle. Tensions grow and promises are broken resulting in devastating consequences.

A novel of a family trying to stay together moving to Newfoundland restoring a new home. A man with an angry temperament a wife agreeing to try to heal but really wanting out and their two children .
This is a beautifully written heart wrenching novel full of truths wounds real life emotions.Highly recommend #netgalley#textpublishing

In this incredibly powerful and suspenseful novel of family dysfunction, Roy, Maryanne and their two children Freya and Daniel, move from Sydney to Newcastle, Australia, to start a new life. It gradually becomes clear that something bad has happened in the past, and now Roy has bought this dilapidated and derelict house to restore and at the same time restore his family. With brilliant characterisation, flawless dialogue and a vivid and atmospheric sense of place, this is one of the most unputdownable books I have ever read, chilling and unpredictable in its exposition and written with expert timing and pace. It becomes increasingly obvious that Roy is a ticking time-bomb and is one of the most frightening men I have ever encountered in fiction. The tension builds and builds and I defy anyone not to hold their breath reading this excellent, if deeply disturbing, novel. Highly recommended.

This is a moving story about a family struggling to adapt to life in a new town, whilst renovating a derelict house. But just as the house slowly improves to becomes a home, the parents' relationship comes to breaking point. The children, Freya and Daniel have no choice but to try and find their own way through the emotional turmoil that faces them. Beautifully written and at times a painfully realistic view of family life.

This was a really good read, I love when the book sets the stage in the first pages for what is going to happen, this one says something like “I will remember later, in the gloom of an early morning, with the jostle of neighbors and the blue and red lights washing across everything”. From then on, I was hooked. The feeling of something ominous was going to happen was set. The writing is excellent, the story is told from Freya and Maryanne’s views. Maryanne, the wife and mother, has been separated from her husband for a year, and has just moved back. She is trying to make it work one more time, we get little tidbits of what could possibly have caused the riff between them, but the author drops hints and you want to keep reading to find out more. Freya is the 15 year old daughter, she has grown up in this family and is silently struggling with her mother’s decision to return to her father. She hides most of her emotions and the author, again, leads you on thinking she may be the cause of the “blue and red lights”. This book is written like an ocean wave, it starts out small and begins to crescendo towards several possibilities of what the ending could be, you know it ends with “blue and red lights”. I finished this book in just a few settings. The character development is strong, you can sit back and see how Maryanne is absorbed in her own life, should she try to find the strength to break away for the good of the children, but can she? Does she really love her husband? You see Freya going down a bad path, but will she see the error of her ways, is there something more ominous that her father has done? I would recommend this book to anyone who likes a drama with great build up. Yes, towards the end the language gets a little bit rough, not a lot, but if that bothers you, please beware.
I was allowed the benefit of reading this book from Net Galley for my review.

3.5★
“He had kissed her goodbye, his lips hard and dry, his eyes unmoving. They’d been fighting the night before. She couldn’t even remember why, did not know so much the substance of the exchange that had led into their fight, only its shape, the sudden twist of words that had opened something beneath them, and there they’d been, sliding into it.”

Roy kisses Maryanne as he goes to work. They’ve been together since they were very young and have two kids, Freya, 14, and Daniel, 8. They’ve just moved to Newcastle, NSW, a coastal city north of Sydney, Australia, because Roy has bought a derelict old house to renovate and sell.

Sounds pretty normal, right? Except we meet them as Maryanne and the children are leaving her mother’s house where they have been living while the parents were separated.

We don’t know exactly why, but it’s obvious from the beginning that Roy is a muscular, physical sort of handyman/builder with a short fuse. He’s anxious to make up for lost time as a family, but Freya remains untrusting and gratefully accepts her grandmother’s phone number when Nan tells her to keep it and hide it, just in case.

They meet the gay next-door neighbour who helps Roy move a table but whom Roy immediately sends home, keeping his family tight and close. There had been a fire in the house, it was left stinking and filthy. Roy said it was great - the worst house in the best street – except it wasn’t a good street and there was a brothel just down the road.

Maryanne is a nurse, working nights at the nearby hospital, while Roy had a one-year contract, so they don’t share a lot of time together. Some of the story is from Maryanne’s point of view, but more of it is told from Freya’s – how she meets kids at school, how she struggles with camping out on the dining room floor with her little brother, who’s a quiet little boy.

The beach and the shore are where both Freya and Maryanne find some respite. Freya meets an alternative sort of kid, Josh, who has a few face piercings, smokes dope, shoplifts, and loves music. He tells Freya he can do pretty much what he wants because his mother left a few years ago and his dad hasn’t really recovered and leaves Josh to his own devices.

Freya’s discontent is certainly understandable, but she is also typical of most teens I’ve known. No matter where you are in your teens, you just KNOW it would be better to be someplace else, without parents, of course. [I tell kids that it’s Nature’s way of making sure kids want to strike out on their own one day so we aren’t all living piled on top of each other in the same house for generations! But I digress.]

There are awkward parts of the book where bits of local history and colour are dropped in – caves, shipwrecks, attractions – and the Newcastle earthquake of 1989 is a plot point. There is a lot of 80s music featured, on cassettes, of course, to emphasise the period. And there are scenes at school sandwiched in here and there. I did enjoy one, though, where a teacher who knew she was fighting a losing battle persisted anyway.

“‘Hormones,’ Mrs O’Neill said in the swelter of the classroom. ‘You girls are all wading through a soup of hormones. Don’t take any risks. Don’t trust your instincts, except when they tell you what I tell you. If that voice in your head doesn’t sound like me, it’s not worth listening to. And you boys, God help you. Don’t listen to anything that comes into your head. Not a thing, unless it’s STOP, STOP, STOP. You boys need stop signs tattooed on your foreheads. Not that you’d ever look at yourselves long enough to notice.’

Shouting into the wind, she was. The family dynamic shifts to and fro with underlying discontent, distrust, and a sense of impending danger.

Roy loses his job, but keeps working on the house. Maryanne is kept busy at the hospital and is always on eggshells around Roy. Freya wags school and starts using pot, while little Daniel tries to learn the clarinet.

Roy is aggressively jealous of the time Maryanne spends with the gay guy next door and with her workmates. Not a happy family. And we do eventually learn why Maryanne is so cautious around Roy, but it seems to be a very long time coming.

It's obvious Sala's got talent, and some passages are poetically descriptive, so I'll be keeping an eye out for what he does next.

Thanks to NetGalley and Text Publishing for the copy for review from which I’ve quoted (so quotes may have changed).

Moving to Newcastle was meant to be a new start for Roy, Maryanne and their children Freya and Daniel. A new house, new schools, new jobs, a change of scene to help them re-unite after a year spent apart. But from the start, nothing seems to work out as planned. The house is a derelict mess, trashed and damaged by squatters. Roy immediately sets to work to clean and renovate it and make it fit to be a family house again but he is still seething with anger against Maryanne for leaving him and there is a dark psychological tension that settles over the family. Maryanne lives on tenterhooks, never knowing what mood Roy will be in when he comes home. His jealousy and resentment makes it hard for her to make friends and keep in touch with her mother. Teenage Freya feels the stress and tension keenly and tries to numb her pain with risk-taking behaviour, all the time worried for her mother and younger brother. She can feel that a crisis is building and is fearful of when it will erupt and how it will affect them all.

This is a dark story of a fractured family struggling to be whole again. The psychological tension is palpable, building slowly into a dark storm that you know must eventually break, damaging all in it's path. The characters are well drawn - angry, moody Roy driven by jealousy with violence seething just below the surface; Maryanne trying to placate him and protect her children, particularly young Daniel who is always getting in trouble and Freya, our narrator trying to navigate adolescence in a new environment, fearful of her father and worried about her mother and brother. The author has placed these events firmly into the Australian vernacular with his detailed descriptions of Newcastle and the events that occurred in that year (1989).

This book feels like a slow dreamy acccount of a car crash, but it's so beautifully described and emotive that you can't help but keep reading. It took me a while to get into it but once I had I needed to know what happens.

With just the right amount of flaws and redeeming features in each character you can really relate to and engage with each one of them, which makes you sympathise with them whilst at the same time want to scream through the pages to them.

This is a beautifully written book and I am looking forward to more by Michael Sala

The Restorer is a fantastic story of a family living under psychological terror.

Roy and Maryanne have relocated to Newcastle, an unfashionable coastal town in New South Wales, from the bright lights of Sydney. Roy has bought a derelict old cottage near the seafront that was last occupied by druggy squatters who burnt through the floor of the main room into the creepy basement. Their children, Freya - an awkward teenager - and Daniel - still in primary school - are terrified of what might lurk in the dark depths...

Although the move was claimed to be for Roy's work, it seems that they are running away from something in Sydney. There is a dark past that drip feeds into the narrative. This is done with perfect pacing, alternating points of view from Freya to Maryanne and back, we see a complex set of relationships unfolding, and Roy sits with brooding menace over everything.

Newcastle, a place I don't know, is depicted convincingly as a dead-end town populated by dead-beat dropkicks. Those who show any spark of life seem to be shunned by their peers until they buckle to the pressure to under-achieve. Its not going work wonders for the Novocastrian tourist agency.

The novel builds the tension very well until it reaches a heartbreaking denouement that, unusually in a novel, evokes a feeling of strong anger.

I look forward to reading more of Michael Sala.