A FAR-FLUNG LIFE

Tragedy strikes a remote Australian sheep-farming family, with consequences that will ripple through generations.

Fourteen years after her notable debut, The Light Between Oceans (2012), Australian-born author Stedman returns with a decades-spanning epic featuring the MacBride family, “sensible but shrewd, careful but not mean,” who have occupied Meredith Downs in Western Australia for years. Their spread covers nearly a million acres and contains 20,000 sheep. But the vehicle crash that takes place in January 1958 plunges the well-ordered sheep station into turmoil. Bereaved widow Lorna MacBride must take over management of the enterprise, while nursing her son Matt back to health, a job she shares with daughter Rosie. Yet the pain, grief, and reorientation don’t end there. More heartbreak ensues, driven by a terrible secret that will haunt Matt like a curse. Lorna’s grandson, Andy, is the one bright spark in the family as he grows into a quick, likable youth with a passion for geology, a useful connection when, in the 1960s, during the Australian mining boom, geologist Bonnie Edquist and her team start exploring the Meredith Downs lands. Stedman’s novel evokes the immensity of the landscape, its flora and fauna, the exhausting work of running a sheep station, and the sparse population of the community, all in attentive detail, but the dark lineaments of her story and their corrosive effects hang heavy over its pages. Other secrets dot the novel, several of them intensified by the norms of the era. The reader is teased with the possibility of truths emerging from several directions, including a nosy postmistress and a punctilious policeman, but secrecy persists, both a burden and an enduring act of self-sacrifice. Though less emotionally compelling than the author’s previous novel, this is a work of intense moral commitment, constantly devoted to the sympathetic exploration of private pain.

A heartfelt saga weighed down by gloom and periods of stasis.