On the one hand, it’s a rather beautiful story amid the natural decay of a part of town and the progress that displaces the people in those community, and on the other hand, it’s a story about setting yourself free and working to stay that way.

The magical thing about it all is that this is a story about running away and about finding yourself much later in life than most of these stories usually take place. Rennie and Ellis are not young women but needing to be in the right place for you isn’t something that goes away after your twenties.

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Finely crafted, The Floating Garden is at once an elegy for the forgotten and a subversive counter-history to the tumult of rapid progress.

The Floating Garden is a beautifully written, gently humorous and highly detailed slice of history. It also has an absorbing story-line which kept me turning the page.

The Floating Garden is a fine example how fiction can be useful in expanding our understanding of the past ... I enthusiastically recommend this book to other readers, especially those who care about Sydney, and those interested in a new type of historical fiction.

It's impressive that these disparate narratives come together so naturally to enrich each other. What a wonderful book.