<DIV>A two-time winner of Australia's prestigious<i>The Age</i>Book of the Year Award, Joan London's debut novel,<i>Gilgamesh</I>, was published to rapturous acclaim both in her native Australia and in the United States. Now, London has delivered<i>The Good Parents</I>, a tender and compelling tale of mother love and the harrowing moment when a daughter spreads her wings and vanishes from her parents' orbit. Maya de Jong is an eighteen-year-old country girl who moves to Melbourne and begins an affair with her new boss. When Maya's parents, Toni and Jacob, arrive for a visit, Maya is gone?no one knows where. Maya, for reasons of her own, leaves haunting clues in late-night calls to her brother at home, carefully avoiding detection by the two people who love her most. Ultimately, to find her daughter Toni will have to revisit a part of her past that she thought she had shut off forever?the closest she ever came to being a lost girl herself.<i>The Good Parents</i>is at once utterly contemporary and a story as old as humanity itself: a stunning portrait of familial love and how far we can drift apart in the moments between the words we speak.</DIV>