David Francis

Wedding Bush Road

A Novel

A young lawyer in Los Angeles is called back to his family's farm in rural Australia and plunged into a complex struggle between past and present, town and country, and the secrets that haunt them all.

When he learns of his mother's ailing health, Daniel Rawson must leave Los Angeles and travel half a world away to the family's horse farm on Wedding Bush Road, one hundred miles outside of Melbourne. Estranged from his parents, Daniel is hesitant to revisit their history: long divorced, his mother still maintains the farm having put out her cheating, rakish husband, and even in these later years her anger burns brightly.

Daniel arrives at the farm in the heat of his parents' conflict with Sharen, an alluring tenant and ex–lover of his father now perched on family land. Sharen and her unstable son Reggie complicate an already difficult family dynamic while Daniel has to tend to his mother's condition, his father's contentious behavior, and the swell of memory that strikes whenever he visits the farm. As Daniel is increasingly drawn to Sharen, the various tensions across the farm will spark events that cannot help but change them all.