Imagine that since the age of 5 you have lived with distant relatives, in a house where you constantly felt like a stranger... an outsider.  Your parents you have been told died in a boating accident.  But there is the estate.  You will be well provided for, they were wealthy and you are the only heir.

When you turn 16 you can wait no longer.  You demand to be returned to your home only to find that it is in a terrible state and the couple who serve as cartakers have spend 11 years robbing you blind.  Worse you discover that the story you have been told all these years is not true!  Your mother died a good 6 months after your father!  An accident with a gun, you are now told.  What is a 16 year old girl in the middle of the outback of Australia to do with this information?

Winter has just found her parents graves and read the headstones:

     I moved over to the tree and sat against it, staring at the stone
     words.  Not on the same day.  My mother had been alive for more
     than six months after my father's death.  Then she too had died.
     How had she died?   By accident?  There was no clue.  Only one
     thing was certain.  She hadn't drowned.  Otherwise they would have
     put that on the headstone, to match the first one.

     If she hadn't drowned, the story in my mind, the set of facts I'd lived
     with all these years, was wrong.  The story of my life was false.  I'd
     built my life on a story and it was a lie.

To find out what really happened and how Winter will deal with the information she finds you'll need to read John Marsden's Winter.