The search for a missing woman in the Australian Outback prompts a young boy’s walkabout in this “extraordinary and beautifully realized” novel (Library Journal).
On the edge of the remote salt flats of Australia, a free-spirited young woman blows in from nowhere and disturbs the mundane yet precarious equilibrium of a family farm. The family’s twelve-year-old boy is enchanted by her. His mother despises her. And the brutish farmhand wants to possess her.
Then, as suddenly as she first appeared, she vanishes. The only trace of her is her bloodied green cotton dress, laid out neatly in the stable amid the straw and dung. In want of clues to her whereabouts, the boy goes in search of a charismatic Indian hawker who may or may not have the answers. As he journeys through the broken landscape, accompanied only by his horse and his dog, the boy soon becomes aware of another party, converging with more dangerous intent, on his destination.
“When a writer like Meehan is compared to Faulkner and McCarthy, a reader expects stylish prose to abound. And it does here . . . [in] a bold, stylized debut” about a boy’s heartbreaking rite of passage in a grand, unpredictable and foreboding wasteland (Kirkus Reviews).
