Book excerpt: Spanning the five decades since they were built up out of the cabbage fields, This Road is Red is a novel about the thousands of residents who have lived there. Each of their lives are linked to another by a character, an incident or a place with lives overlapping and connecting in a mixture of drama and domesticity. There is a fire, a suicide, a birth, a marriage, a death and a near-death. A couple of ghosts, several fights, a handful of jellies and an overdose. The book is a record of how the events of the last five decades have impacted on a community.