Esther Chatwin has always been a quiet, insular person, the kind of person who is “happiest at the edge of things, watching and dreaming.” When she was in her teens she had been chronically debilitated by panic attacks and her growing distress when she is thrust into the public eye after her husband is elected Prime Minister of Australia lies at the heart of Fiona Capp’s topical novel Gotland.
Capp dissects the pressures placed on a family where one member achieves the kind of public position that invites increasingly intense public scrutiny and who is faced with the kind of compromise to strongly-held beliefs which challenges the foundation of their personal relationships.
Being First Lady was not the life Esther had expected when she was wooed by David then a