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Jane Harper (The Dry) meets Nick Cave in backroad noir and beyond.
When burnt-out Aussie nurse and wannabe writer, Ella, flees her suffocating life in Melbourne for a housesitting assignment on a remote rural property, she is thrust into a brutal and unfamiliar landscape. Her budding friendship with Tom from the neighbouring property reveals a more tender side to the land, with a vast beauty that penetrates her defences, and stirs neglected yearnings and unsayable questions. Yet this strange mix of brutality and tenderness also uncovers buried bones of her past, and Ella’s stubborn curiosity draws her into a dangerous mystery that has her spinning blind.
Has her presence here disturbed more than memories, and will the swirling storm threaten to waken more than the land’s red dust?
When burnt-out Aussie nurse and wannabe writer, Ella, flees her suffocating life in Melbourne for a housesitting assignment on a remote rural property, she is thrust into a brutal and unfamiliar landscape. Her budding friendship with Tom from the neighbouring property reveals a more tender side to the land, with a vast beauty that penetrates her defences, and stirs neglected yearnings and unsayable questions. Yet this strange mix of brutality and tenderness also uncovers buried bones of her past, and Ella’s stubborn curiosity draws her into a dangerous mystery that has her spinning blind.
Has her presence here disturbed more than memories, and will the swirling storm threaten to waken more than the land’s red dust?
In this interview Chris Ashmore and I explore the guts and pulses of the novel, Wake the Dust. We briefly track the lively plot, without giving away the ending. We explore some of the prominent themes, and challenges in writing the novel; including the landscape of rural-remote Australia and our changing relationship with the land; Ella’s messy inscape, riddled with internal conflicts and yearnings, including her loneliness and struggle to write. Other themes emerge such as sexual violence, the impact of trauma and the push-pull between past and present.
Warning: this interview contains explicit language (from the novel, in the section where Chris and I read the bedroom scene).
