A Far-Flung Life

This family tragedy from bestseller Stedman (The Light Between Oceans) is captivating and distressing in equal measure. Set on a sheep station in remote Western Australia, where the MacBride family leases nearly one million acres and tends to 20,000 sheep, the novel begins in 1958 when a truck accident kills the family’s patriarch and eldest son and leaves the youngest son, 17-year-old Matt, severely injured. Saddled with cognitive issues and memory loss, he faces a long road to recovery under the care of his mother, Lorna, and 20-year-old sister, Rose. Months later, a confounding drunken incident exacerbates the tragedy, forcing Matt to cover up terrible secrets. It would spoil the novel to reveal more, beyond that during this time, Lorna’s grandson, Andy, enters the picture, brightening the MacBrides’ gloom with his youthful enthusiasm and love of geology. By 1969, new arrival Bonnie Edquist, a surveyor for a mining company, threatens to upend Matt’s safe and quiet way of life, while a nosy postmistress and a self-righteous police officer start to uncover his closely guarded secrets. Stedman conveys the staggering scale of the sheep station’s isolated sprawl, and it’s impossible to look away from the grim series of events. Readers will be transported. Agent: Susan Armstrong, Conville & Walsh. (Mar.)