THE FEATHER AND THE STONE

From the author of River of the Sun (1992): another billy- rattling, sweatily atmospheric yarn of life in pioneer Australia. Here, in the 1870's, a young woman, emigrating from England, is dealt a bad hand until—after adventures involving deaths, chicanery, and close escapes—she turns up trumps in love and fortune. Sibell Delahunty is one of the few survivors of a shipwreck. Orphaned, penniless, she's ransomed from a group of Aborigines, along with a fellow survivor, Logan Conal (an Irish man of a cloudy past), by crabbed homesteader Jack Cambray and his nice wife Josie. All of this with the intervention of ``Jimmy Moon''—the traveling Aborigine, Jaljurra, whose movements between two worlds will bring him to a tragic end. Eventually, Sibell escapes exploitation by a well-to-do city family and ventures on to the Northern Territory to be companion to Charlotte Hamilton—elderly, crusty, and kind—on her 5,000-square-mile Black Wattle ranch. Also on the ranch are the Hamilton boys, Zack and Cliff, and Cliff's wife, sour Maudie. But, meanwhile, Sibell has found herself in love with Logan, who unbeknownst to her has run off with Josie, now a widow, become a mine manager, and is cheating on all fronts. There'll be ambushes, treks on waters roiling with crocodiles, spear-hurling, and shootouts while wide-eyed Sibell tries to absorb a new kind of farming: ``Gangs of men...rode large raw-boned horses, herds of wild-eyed cattle roamed the land...riders, whips cracking, would come racing across the back country....'' Can Sibell stay the course? Period adventure and romance—Aussie-style—at a lathering gallop.