Books
Mother Shadow
$32.99
Release date: 3rd April 2026
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Stories about mothers and children are powerful. They are stories about love, about the gentleness (and cruelty) and resilience (and weakness) of human beings, and the enduring hope that connects generations. They come from core emotions, arising from our fragility, our instinct to protect each other and our longing for life to continue beyond ourselves. Mother Shadow is that kind of story. And Cynthia Banham has written it like a thriller. Her rich description of centuries-old Italian city streetscapes creates an atmosphere of mystery and suspense. The story draws you in and doesn’t let go as clues about her search for her Italian great-grandmother arrive at a steady pace. I was on edge to the very end in anticipation of what was going to happen next.
Moreno Giovannoni, author of The Immigrants
Mother Shadow
A Meditation on Maternal Inheritance
About the Book:
Mother Shadow opens with the uncovering of a family secret. The author’s great-grandmother was not an orphan, as she’d been told, but a foundling, relinquished at birth by a mother who ‘did not consent to be named’. The discovery of the abandoned baby in her maternal line triggers a passionate and indignant reaction as she asks: what kind of a mother would relinquish her child? It also triggers a painful personal memory of the day she dropped her baby after falling backwards in her wheelchair and realised her worst fear. That her broken body, permanently injured in a plane crash in her early 30s, could not be trusted to protect her baby.
Troubled by her rush to judgement of her ancestor, the author becomes fixated on uncovering the mother’s identity and piecing together the fragments of her life, a quest that takes her and her family to Bologna. As she comes to understand the series of tragic events that compelled her ancestor to abandon her baby, she wonders if the compulsion to make sense of the woman’s act is linked to the overwhelming sense of inadequacy that haunts her because she is unable to mother according to the standards she has set for herself.
About the Author:
Cynthia Banhamis a full-time writer and part-time habitat gardener.
Previously, she worked as a lawyer, journalist and academic. She spent two decades in Canberra, initially working in the Parliament House press gallery and later completing a PhD on human rights law and politics at the Australian National University. Since returning to Sydney, she has become immersed in restoring her manicured garden into a wilder place of refuge for frogs, lizards, insects, and small birds.
Among the many losses Cynthia suffered after surviving a plane crash with life-changing injuries was a connection to nature. In her twenties and thirties, she had trekked through the South American Andes, the Himalayas twice, and ran three marathons. The loss of mobility was devastating. Through habitat gardening, she has found a way to reclaim some of that: she can no longer move easily through nature, but nature can move around her.
ISBN: 978-1-7642397-1-4