STILL WATERS

Still Waters is a deeply romantic, emotionally rich and saucy Australian Outback novel set against the vast, ancient, silver-grey landscape of the Victorian Mallee, one of Australia's most underwritten and most beautiful regions. When Darcy Whitfield signs her divorce papers at nine o'clock and finds herself on the floor of her Melbourne apartment with a packet of Tim Tams and a three-line job advertisement at seven-fifteen in the evening, she makes the most honest decision of her adult life: she applies for the position of station hand and housekeeper at Yarran Station in the Mallee, run by a man named James Alcott, with nothing but her name, her phone number, and three sentences. James Alcott is forty, third-generation Mallee, the calmest and most certain person Darcy has ever met, the kind of man whose stillness doesn't feel like absence but like presence, the kind of certainty that doesn't demand anything from the room but makes everything else in the room feel slightly uncertain by comparison. He meets her with breakfast and patience and twelve thousand acres of the most extraordinary country she has ever encountered, and he gives her all of it at exactly the pace she needs to receive it. What builds between them builds the way the Mallee builds things: slowly, without announcement, in the accumulation of ordinary days, the bore maintenance and the shearing shed and the fence work and the verandah sunsets and the wood fire in the winter kitchen and a kiss in the yards on a Saturday afternoon that has the weight of five months of watching each other become real. Darcy arrives fiercely independent, refusing to need anyone, and finds that the Mallee and this man are not asking her to need them. They are simply there, patient and enormous and entirely themselves, until she discovers that needing has nothing to do with it, that what she has found is not a dependency but a belonging. Spanning five years of Mallee seasons from the first breakfast to the daughter named Alice who points at the country every morning and says one word, Mallee. Still Waters is a celebration of the slow, saucy, deeply true love that grows between two people who are both, in their different ways, exactly located, and of the specific extraordinary beauty of a landscape that gives you the ground to build the rest of your life on.