Birth Jacket

About the Book

Kate has come to Laos to find the unknown mother who troubles her dreams. From her spider-like house on the Mekong, she searches for her ancestral roots and for herself. Like the river, her journey is sometimes slow and meandering, sometimes violent and full of turbulence.

What can she learn from Kham, her gentle lover, whose presence brings six bullying policemen to her home in the dead of night? Why is she taken into custody when she tries to visit Long Cheng? Can her fellow-Australian, Wesley, with all his cleverness, help Kate to find her way? And who is the old Hmong woman in the dirt-floor hut who speaks fluent English but tells much less than she knows? She is as full of wisdom and mystery as the nearby Plain of Jars. As Kate learns more of the horrors of the so-called Secret War in Laos and the complicity of the CIA in the deaths of half the Hmong population, she begins to unravel the hidden secrets of her own family.

About the Author

G.K. Ovington was born in rural Australia. Faced with the choice of an acting career or Law, he chose the latter only to stumble his way through his twenties in a mix of jobs - banking, factories, selling encyclopedias, cleaning toilets in an office block owned by one of Australia's richest men - interspersed with extended bouts of traveling (he got lost in India for two years) and a degree in Psychology and Philosophy from a New Zealand university. He has worked as a primary teacher in the south of India and on remote Aboriginal communities in the Pilbara and Kimberley regions of Australia, as a university academic and has spent most of the past 12 years in Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand working in the field of educational development. He also has a Masters of Education and a PhD in Social Work education. He combines full-time work with writing. He has never lost his passion for travel and this passion is shared by his partner. He currently lives in Bangkok.

Birth Jacket is his first novel.