University of Otago Press, 1999. Good second-hand condition.

Russian Dolls is a novel with a large framework - generations of the same New Zealand family back to 1868, a woman of today uncovering the tale of her maiden great aunt and a soldier in World War I. In her search, Isla finds other family stories against which her own experience since she left home stormily at the age of seventeen reverberates.
The landscape is as important in this novel as the people, taking the reader from a quiet rural valley to the trenches of war-torn Europe, and closing on a Nelson beach where 'the sea crept in and out across the sand flats' and the line between sea and sky is invisible.