Kirsty Jagger
Roseghetto
“Roseghetto is a remarkable, at times confronting story. It is a tale that needs to be told, with both tenderness and honesty. Only a writer of Kirsty Jagger’s calibre could write this story. Roseghetto is in her blood and in her bones.”
Shayla is on a newspaper assignment when she returns to the public housing estate where she grew up and finds it demolished. The locals have been evicted, their homes erased, their stories too. Standing among the rubble of Rosemeadow, Shayla is assailed by her memories of living there. The bad secret Daddy asked her to keep. Mummy rekindling a dangerous romance. Making friends with ‘the gutter kids’.
Surrounded by poverty, confronted by domestic violence, Shayla found her escape in reading. Now it’s time to tell the stories of Rosemeadow, including her own.
Roseghetto is an unforgettable and moving coming-of-age story, an account of breaking the cycle of violence and poverty.
About the Author
Kirsty Jagger is a journalist by trade. In 2019, she won the inaugural Heyman Mentorship Award, established by acclaimed Australian author Kathryn Heyman for a writer from a background of social or economic disadvantage. Roseghetto takes some inspiration from growing up in the housing commission estates of Sydney’s western suburbs. This is her first novel.