The Precipice of Innocence, (Paperback)

<p>Andrea Belynda Dundee - known to everyone as Bel - is born in Singapore on St Andrew's Day to a mother who wants more than she has and a father who accepts less than he deserves. From the beginning, Bel watches Margaret transform a passport officer into a diplomat, a rented flat into a residence, and loneliness into foreign experience. She learns the lesson completely: origin is not destiny, and presentation is everything.</p><p>By the time she reaches Morrison's Academy in Scotland, Bel has already begun editing herself. A girl with a borrowed accent, a foreign birth and a hunger for refinement, she discovers that ambition, applied with sufficient discipline, can pass for breeding. What it cannot do - not yet - is make her safe.</p><p>Through her twenties and thirties she moves across London, Washington, Sydney and Melbourne, collecting the surfaces of other people's lives. As a nanny in a diplomat's household, she observes power at close quarters and mistakes proximity for membership. As a new arrival in Australia she falls in with a Scientology-adjacent organisation, finding in its language of suppression and spiritual injury a ready-made explanation for every wound and a ready-made target for every grievance.</p><p>She marries Matt Coffey, a man of quiet certainty, and builds a family whose love she cannot help turning into evidence. Their daughter Zoe's disability becomes both a private grief and, later, a public credential. Sandy's supposed dyslexia is folded into Bel's professional mythology. Irina learns early that her mother's attention is never innocent. When illness, doctrine and pride collide, Bel's need to be right proves more durable than tenderness.</p><p>Her second life is built on literacy. Armed with a fabricated degree, a borrowed methodology and a genuine intelligence that makes the fraud harder to detect, Bel becomes a sought-after speaker in education circles. She advertises herself as a Clinical Director, writes with authority, travels to conferences, and offers anxious parents and teachers the thing they most want: certainty. She becomes the mother whose disabled child taught her everything, the expert who questions what the establishment refuses to examine, the woman who has turned adversity into a national conversation. It is a magnificent performance. It helps some children. It also damages several lives.</p><p>The instrument of her undoing is Tom Healy: a bachelor by habit and a journalist by vocation, who arrives in her life after the long shadow of lockdown wearing a linen jacket, beautiful old shoes and the irritating air of a man who listens too closely. Tom is not easily managed. He has spent too many years hearing evasions to be charmed by one. He checks. Methodically, patiently, without theatrical accusation, he verifies credentials, traces claims, reads old documents, and finds the widening gap between what Bel has said and what the record shows. The investigation costs him more than he expects. It costs Bel almost everything.</p><p>The Precipice of Innocence closes on a cliff edge on the Mornington Peninsula, in the small hours of a night that may be Bel's last. She has driven there with a canvas bag full of her own incriminating documents - visa pages, university letters, court transcripts, screenshots, a photograph of her dead daughter, and a note from the first husband she never really understood. She is deciding what to do with them, and with herself.</p><p>This is a novel about the distance between who we are and who we say we are, and about what happens when those two things are finally, irrevocably compared. It is about class shame, motherhood, borrowed expertise, institutional cruelty, public vi</p>

• The Precipice of Innocence, (Paperback)
• Author: Romana Clay
• ISBN: 9798199929981
• Format: Paperback
• Publication Date: 2026-06-04
• Page Count: 298