Out of Nowhere

Synopsis

Winner of the Bath Novel Award

Frank Neely is riding in a prison transport van when it is ambushed in the dark. In the chaos that follows, Frank walks free – not into freedom exactly, but into the vast, merciless heat of the Australian interior. He has no money, no plan, and one destination: the daughter he hasn’t seen in years. He calls her Poke. She is the only good thing he can name.

What follows is a journey across a country that seems designed to defeat him. Frank works as a farm labourer under a false name, sleeps rough, evades the police and worse, and encounters, along the way, a series of people who reveal more about Australia’s moral landscape than they intend to. The respectable men are often the most dangerous. The criminals are sometimes the most kind. Frank has wrestled with God his whole life and expects to keep losing; what he will not surrender is his love for his child.

Told in Frank’s relentless present and in the voice of Abi – his former wife, writing in fragments from wherever she’s landed – Out of Nowhere builds a portrait of a man through what he has lost and what he refuses to let go. By turns darkly funny, bleak, and unexpectedly tender, it is a novel about the persistence of love in the face of everything: poverty, prison, distance, and a God with an uncomfortably good aim.

Praise for This Book

‘An impressive, dark-hearted novel which is hugely atmospheric, has an authentic and gripping sense of nastiness, and is peopled by totally convincing characters.’ —Kate Barker