Loveland is the second novel by Australian author, Robert Lukins. When her grandmother Casey Lawrence dies, May is surprised to learn there’s a bequest: a lakeside house and twenty-four acres at Loveland, Nebraska. May’s mother wants her to have the funds once it is sold, to give her a fresh start, to free her from her abusive marriage. But she needs to go to Nebraska to get the official paperwork sorted.

What May finds in Nebraska is not quite what she expected: a poisoned lake and a boarded-up boathouse, the inside of which is a surprise. She learns that her grandmother’s name was actually Casey Love, that she was married into the family who founded the town.

She encounters townspeople and neighbours, all friendly, but in some the friendliness is a thin veneer over the malice they bear towards anyone who might threaten their class action and, as a Love descendant, that means May.

It becomes easy to postpone what she’s meant to be doing, and to ignore her husband’s increasingly irate texts: it may be her inheritance, but he will handle it for her, he maintains. She knows, though, that he won’t be ignored for long…

Through various snippets and anecdotes from different sources, May learns about the Loveland property: a hotel, Ferris wheel and lakeside promenade, one-time playground of the rich, until it burned down just before Casey Love took her baby daughter and fled to Australia.

She learns, too, about her grandmother’s life with her grandfather, Moses Love, none of which Casey ever spoke about, and comes to understand what they had in common, and how history sometimes repeats.

In a dual timeline narrative that highlights the parallels between Casey’s life in the mid-1950s and May’s in the early twenty-first Century, Lukins lets the reader draw conclusions, then turns them around. He gives his characters insightful observations and wraps it all in evocative prose. Clever and compelling.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by Allen & Unwin.