Shy Love Smiles and Acid Drops

This book is based on an exchange of letters between Jane Sinclair’s parents Jean Langley, artist, and John Sinclair, music critic 1960-62, when the author was five and her mother followed her lover, Arthur Boyd, to London, and took her daughter with her. Set in England and Australia, at a time when their friends John and Sunday Reed were high-profile arts patrons at their property Heide, a period of sexual liberation and a flowering of the arts, the complex relationship between Jane’s parents emerges through an exchange of long, often heartbreaking letters and journal entries. The powerful words are strengthened by photographs from that period.