Wake the Dust - Rita McInnes

When burnt-out 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 all her defences, and stirs neglected yearnings and unsayable questions. Yet this strange mix of brutality and tenderness also uncovers buried bones of the 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?