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?

Rita McInnes in conversation with Chris Ashmore and Ruby Carter.

Rita McInnes is a writer and psychologist living and writing in Ballarat, Victoria. She writes from an indwelling curiosity for the many lost and forgotten, hiding or vanishing things that we seek and yearn for, and a deep abiding love for this vast continent she wanders and lives with-in. Her first book, I-brainmap, freeing your brain for happiness, was published in 2014 (and recorded as a podcast in 2023). This is her first novel.

Chris Ashmore, of Chris Ashmore Media. Ruby Carter is a dedicated student and lover of literature.

This event takes place on Wadawurrung Country. The Ballaarat Mechanics' Institute acknowledges the Wadawurrung People of the Kulin Nation as the first inhabitants and Traditional Custodians of the lands where we work, learn and create. Always Was, Always Will Be, Aboriginal Land.