Scrapbooks and Broken Strings recounts Jude Murphy's formative years set firmly in the Australian 80s. After a shocking tragedy pierces her childhood, Jude struggles to manage her grief, endure the challenges of young adulthood, navigate a series of tumultuous relationships and traverse the terrain of motherhood and post-natal depression. In this courageously candid and often darkly humorous memoir, Jude shares her battle with drugs, alcohol, illness and madness. Well paced and written in a conversational tone, Scrapbooks and Broken Strings will take you through a range of emotional highs and lows before concluding with a sense of hope.

" ... My thesis is just a small collection of family moments, some ordinary and some extraordinary to the average household. Every family has its inner differences and struggles, whether famous or not, but if each member works together, a broken family still can function as a whole." -- from Introduction

Into the Havoc Bar and Grill, an end-of-the-world watering hole on the outer fringes of the metropolis, walks the entertainment, Jenny Slade. She has the look down: beat-up leather jacket, motorcycle boots, cheekbones, and wild hair. But she’s no ordinary guitar heroine. Her guitar is like none her audience has ever seen, part deadly weapon, part creature from some alien lagoon. Is that hair? Are those nipples? Is it flesh? Where does Jenny Slade come from? Where does she go? Geoff Nicholson fans know that wherever that is, the ride will be like no other.