She is present at the dinner when Evan and Helena announce they are opening their house and studios for other artists to live and work in. She listens to the artists’ talk of radical politics and their criticism of the conservative Australian art scene. Lily is an outsider and as such she is a wonderful narrator – embroiled but not too emotionally involved. The Trenthams’ life offers Lily what she doesn’t have in her own home – she is the only child of conservative, reserved parents – and she loves the freedom, the parade of interesting people, and the sense of belonging, though tenuous, provided by Eva and her sisters, Beatrice and Heloise.
At school, she bonds instantly with the Trenthams’ middle daughter, Eva, and they become inseparable.
/https://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/entertainment/books/2017/01/22/historical-fiction-to-sweep-you-to-another-time-from-the-1930s-to-the-1980s/the-strays.jpg "the strays by emily bitto")
The narrator, Lily, is one of these strays. The title refers to the community of artists whom Evan and Helena Trentham gather around themselves at their spacious and rambling home. Emily Bitto’s debut novel, The Strays, is a compulsively readable story of the 1930s Australian art scene, parental narcissism and female friendship.
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