Books by Bella Pollen

Driven by curiosity and possibility, writer Bella Pollen has always maintained a double life, navigating between a fierce love of family and the yearning for escape until one day, a strange encounter changes everything . . .What does it take to work out who you really are and where you truly belong? From mafia-in-laws to fashion failures to neighbours from hell, Pollen's search for answers is a dazzling and powerful odyssey through the conflicting desires and roles of women in today's confusing world. Interwoven with passages of graphic art by award-winning illustrator Kate Boxer, Meet Me in the In-between is a renegade memoir that takes readers all over the world before bringing them back home again.

A Richard and Judy Book Club selection.The Summer of the Bear is a beautiful story of a family recovering from loss on a remote Scottish island, from Bella Pollen, author of Hunting Unicorns.In the summer of 1979, a tamed grizzly bear is tempted by the lure of freedom and the wild open sea . . . Meanwhile, the sudden death of British diplomat Nicky Fleming has left his wife closed down with shock. Relocated from Cold-War-riven Germany to a remote Hebridean island, Letty Fleming is haunted by the unthinkable - was it an accident, murder or suicide? And how can she ever begin to explain to her three children that their father may have betrayed his country? Struggling to find solace in a place she loves, Letty begins to unravel the mystery of Nicky's death, but her determination to protect the children from the truth blinds her to the demons they are already battling. As the family's secrets threaten to tear them apart, it is only the strange but brilliant Jamie who manages to hold on to the one thing he knows for sure: his father has promised to return, and Nicky Fleming was a man who never broke a promise . . .

To the south lies Mexico. To the north you can see the flat plains and snow tipped peaks of the Patagonia Mountains . . . and in between is a strange and wild landscape representing a freedom so great that for a long moment, I find it hard to breathe. On the run from her claustrophobic marriage in London, Alice Coleman moves her two small children to the Arizona desert with the intention of renovating an abandoned mining town on the Mexican Border - and there finds an escape and solitude she hadn't thought possible. But in the dusty, alien atmosphere, where it seems that everyone - from Benjamin, the town's Mexican caretaker to the laconic cowboy, Duval - has something to hide, Alice is uncertain whom to trust. As winter moves to scorching summer, what seemed idyllic turns deadly as Alice is drawn deeper into an obsessive quest for revenge, until finally she must decide how far she is willing to go to cling on to her freedom and what exactly she will have to sacrifice. Fierce and compelling, Midnight Cactus explores the territory between unrealized dreams and the pull of family. In a blistering climax Alice discovers it is only by risking everything that you learn what is really worth living for.