A family farm in rural Australia is the backdrop for “a rich, beautifully textured novel, unforgettable in its setting and the people who live there” (Los Angeles Review of Books).
When he learns of his mother’s ailing health, young lawyer Daniel Rawson must leave Los Angeles and travel half a world away to the family’s horse farm on Wedding Bush Road, one hundred miles outside of Melbourne. Estranged from his parents, Daniel is hesitant to revisit their history: long divorced, his mother still maintains the farm having put out her cheating, rakish husband, and even in these later years her anger burns brightly.
Daniel arrives at the farm in the heat of his parents’ conflict with Sharen, an alluring tenant and ex-lover of his father now perched on family land. Sharen and her unstable son Reggie complicate an already difficult family dynamic while Daniel has to tend to his mother’s condition, his father’s contentious behavior, and the swell of memory that strikes whenever he visits the farm. As Daniel is increasingly drawn to Sharen, the various tensions across the farm will spark events that cannot help but change them all.
“A rich and moving and resonant story about the debts we owe to the people and places of our past, with writing so evocative that it feels like burying your face in the Australian soil. David Francis has given us a masterpiece, a novel for anyone who’s ever left their hometown.” —Nathan Hill, author of The Nix
“In prose as severely beautiful as the land depicted, Francis takes us into the bleeding heart of family. Well recommended for many readers.” —Library Journal
