Cry Baby, by Lauren Liebenberg

As he nears his fifth birthday, Sam’s curious dreams of a lost child begin to steal quietly into his waking state. Sam’s mother, Grace, watches with growing fear the disturbing changes taking place in her charming, spirited son – the fighting at school, the bed-wetting, the meteor showers of defiance. Grace is determined to find out what lies behind Sam’s nightmares, and her search will take her deeper and deeper into layers of love and bondage buried beneath the surface of the family, and into its molten heart. Cry Baby is a story about boyhood and motherhood, about what binds families, the past to the present, about suffocation and deliverance. It is at once a stinging satirical slap across the face of barren suburbia and a poignant hymn to the extraordinary beauty in ordinary lives.