Sundogs

Zan O’Connell is having a bad year. When her beloved stepfather has a heart attack on an overseas holiday with her mother, forcing the two of them to stay in England until he’s well enough to travel, Zan has to go live with her grandmother and go back to the school she left four years ago. But she finds herself at odds with her old group of friends, and pretty soon she is completely sidelined by them and reduced to hanging around with a bratty outsider, Solange Foley.
When her grandmother carts her off to the sedate seaside hotel where she’s been holidaying for the last thirty years, Zan isn’t at all pleased to find Solange staying at a nearby caravan park with her family. Zan takes a particular dislike to Solange’s brother, Rhett, and when her grandmother packs her off on a walk with the Foley family, Rhett and Zan’s mutual irritation erupts in an argument that causes them to get separated from the others.

Stranded in the hills overnight with only a bag of peanuts and Zan’s school copy of The Diary of Anne Frank, they continue the argument, start talking about the hard times they’ve both been going through, discuss Anne Frank, the universe…and finally start to see a few glimmers of hope