Shape of Ourselves (Paperback)

Every week in a hospital cafeteria on Australia’s Gold Coast, a support group convenes for people with traumatic brain injuries (TBIs). Aside from dealing with physical symptoms, the group also has to discover how their injuries have changed each of them at their very core.

For Pania, this is a dance that rarely surprises her anymore. The car accident she was in at 16 has set the course of her life. She doesn’t know who she would be without it, though she’s sure life would have been easier if she’d stayed with Sal.

Then there’s Lin. She desperately wants to go back to life as a boring stay-at-home mum with a reliable, if sometimes lonely, marriage. Instead, she finds herself uncontrollably impulsive with a temper to match—a shift that threatens to destroy the fragile family life she holds most dear.

Set amidst Australia’s Black Summer and then the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, this medically-focused drama doesn’t ask if people can change. It plumbs the depths of how people react when change is thrust on them and there is no way back to who they used to be.