Gina Tully - amateur acrobat, woman of conscience and manager of a bottom-of-the-cliff residential hotel - has to balance her ideas about how the world should be with her need to keep her job, as the economic reforms of the mid-1980s start to tell on society's most vulnerable. But Gina - confused, bold, sly - journeys beyond the merely political, and what emerges is a celebration of human resilience and the need for intimacy and compassion. First published in 1987, Nigel Cox's celebrated second novel was shortlisted for New Zealand's two major book awards, won the Bucklands Memorial Literary Prize, and was optioned for film.