IF BLOOD IS THICKER than water, it's not always evident in Tony Birch's novel of a family on the edge. "Blood" follows the tumultuous lives of 13-year-old narrator Jesse and his younger sister Rachel as they are dragged from city to city, and bad to worse, by their mother Gwen, a self-destructive drifter, and occasional prostitute, with awful taste in men. Periods of stability for the children, who are mostly left to fend for themselves, are few and agonisingly short-lived. First it is responsible and resourceful Jon, fresh out of gaol, who takes them under his wing and briefly turns their derelict peri-urban shack into a haven. Later, Gwen's estranged, reformed-alcoholic father, Pop, taciturn and racked with guilt about his part in his daughter's downward spiral, provides them with a joyful few weeks of calmness and order in his suburban home. But they are never allowed to settle for long and when Gwen reappears after an unexplained absence, they are whisked away again and thrown back into jeopardy.

Back on the road, foreboding looms at every turn. These portents are sometimes foretold by tarot cards pulled from their mother's deck. Throughout the novel the tarot's unsettling designs are eerily repeated in the people, desolate towns and landscape they pass through in their flight from Gwen's psychopathic lover Ray Crow, a drug dealer driving a battered Camaro caked in bull-dust, who wants his money back.

Ray's pursuit of the children brings to mind the terrifying Reverend Harry Powell LOVE tattooed across his right knuckles, HATE across the left who menaces brother and sister Ben and Pearl in Charles Laughton's haunting 1955 film "Night of the Hunter" (based on the 1953 novel of the same name by Davis Grubb), and Birch makes more explicit reference to Jem and Scout from another classic of the genre, "To Kill a Mockingbird"; "Blood" shares both the shimmering gothic quality of these as well as their celebration of the bonds that help the children rise above and survive the desperate situations they are forced to endure at the hands of predatory adults...

standing up for culture's sake

one dedicated organisation is aiming to preserve one of  indonesia's most unique cultures

With these issues in mind, one group of like-minded individuals decided to try to do its bit to rectify this sad situation. This led to the formation of the association of peranakan tionghoa Indonesia, or ASPERTINA. To learn a little more about ASPERTINA, we spoke to its head, andrew susanto.