Australian writer Olga Masters (1919-1986) classic novel Amy's Children was first published in 1987.

In the 2013 edition published by Text Classics, another Australian writer, Eva Sallis (b. 1964), writes:

“Amy’s Children is … a rich portrait of inner Sydney-life… [during] wartime Australia…We experience the small lives of is characters without judgement…Amy herself does much for which she would have been condemned, then and now.”

After 3 years of marriage, 20-year-old Amy is abandoned by her husband and then she abandons her 3 daughters, leaving them in the care of their grandparents while she heads to Sydney to get a job and a place of her own.

“There is no room for the children she had while still barely out of childhood herself.”

Eventually the eldest of Amy’s children, 15-year-old Kathleen, joins her in Sydney. Even then Amy finds it difficult to admit the child is hers.