Before This Is Over

January 2, 2017
Hannah Halloran, the heroine of Australian author Hickie’s tense debut, worries that an insidious epidemic, which originated in Asia, has invaded her suburban Australian town. She begins stockpiling food and keeping her sons, teenage Zac and five-year-old Oscar, home from school. Hannah’s obsession with storing food and avoiding the public intensifies when the first cases are rumored to have occurred in a nearby town. Her husband, Sean, and her employer think she’s overreacting. When neighbors begin to die, others no longer doubt her. Under these circumstances, how does one cope with entertaining an active child or feeding a growing, whiny teenager, who eats as if supermarkets are still open and refuses to understand why he can’t use the Internet? Neighbors turning on neighbors is expected, but society is beyond broken when a family turns on itself. Hickie realistically depicts how isolation and the threat of disease affect one family, especially when electricity, water, and other services break down. Agent: Torie Doherty Munro, Writers House.

January 15, 2017
When a global epidemic spreads to Sydney, Australia, one mother fights to keep her family alive and together in Hickie's debut thriller.Loyal wife and mother Hannah becomes obsessed with coverage of the Manba virus, convinced against all reports that it will spread to Sydney. As a cancer survivor, she has some personal experience with struggle and illness, but her paranoia leads to an immaculately kept pantry filled with carefully counted staples and stores. What seems at first to be Hannah's annoying sense of paranoia and self-righteousness proves to be brilliant planning when the disease virulently attacks her area of Australia. Quarantined together, Hannah's family faces challenges to their safety and questions about the limits of human empathy as they fight not only to survive, but to keep their own relationships intact. There is no shortage of suspense in Hickie's novel, but on a deep level, it lacks drive. Hannah is complex but a bit too sanctimonious, and the risks she faces do little to paint her in a sympathetic light. There's an effective sense of claustrophobia; once the family goes into quarantine, they have little contact with any other people or any other places, so the reader is trapped with them in their house--and in their roiling emotions. The most wrenching subplot involves a dead neighbor whose little girl is taken in, rather reluctantly, by Hannah's family. Poses the typical challenges to our safe, complacent lives, forcing readers to ask, "What would I do if...."

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