Literature
Jacqueline Rule
The Leaves
Faith and Evelyn are close friends, neighbours, and single mothers of Luke and of Mitch – and both bear the scars of the trauma of colonisation and the Stolen Generations. When Faith dies unexpectedly, Luke’s childhood in Sydney is severed into a ‘before’ and ‘after’ and a chain of catastrophic events is unleashed that will alter the course of his life.
Navigating the upheaval of a broken foster system (that serves as a pipeline to poverty and incarceration in ‘juvie’), The Leaves is a bittersweet meditation on motherhood and loss, on the power of female friendship, and the role of the state in perpetuating violence.
Jacqueline Rule has studied literature and law and spent several years working in a legal organisation, supporting a specialist committee on youth detention in the criminal justice system.