Between a Wolf and a Dog

Between a Wolf and a Dog is a novel by the Australian author Georgia Blain, published in 2016 and her last. Its central character, Ester, is a family therapist.

Ester's appointment book records the anxieties of the middle class: loneliness, relationships and death. She spends her working days helping other people find happiness, and her own family relationships are tense and frayed in ways the book keeps showing the reader. The rain does not stop for the whole of that day.

On the rainy day the novel covers, a decision has to be discussed. Hilary, who is seventy and dying of cancer, has made a decision about how and when she will die, and she has to talk it through with her daughters, Ester and April, who have problems of their own.

The novel is set in Sydney and stays inside a single day, so the weather, the appointments and the conversation all happen at once, and the questions it asks are about what a good life is and how a person knows when a relationship has run out.