THE CORNER COUNTRY

THE CORNER COUNTRY is a warm, deeply romantic and beautifully saucy Australian Outback novel set against the extraordinary ancient landscape of the Corner Country in far west New South Wales, the gibber plains and the opal fields and the waterhole with its pelicans and rock art, one of Australia's most remote and least-known regions. When Stella Raine, a primary school teacher from Dubbo with a restlessness she can't quite name, enters a competition called Work the Land on a Wednesday night at her kitchen table, she wins six weeks on Kallara Station near Tibooburra with third-generation station owner Tom Callahan. She arrives expecting hard work and a new experience. She doesn't expect Tom, warm and quietly funny, trusted by the entire district, the kind of man the whole Corner Country loves, to pursue her with the specific, quiet, relentless patience of someone who has read her competition entry and understood exactly who she is and why she's come. Tom Callahan chose Stella from the finalists because the honesty of her restlessness was the right quality for his country, and from the first morning on the veranda he gives the Corner Country every possible chance to show her what she's been looking for. He takes her to the gibber in first light and the opal fields at White Cliffs and the night sky without light pollution and a waterhole forty kilometres north with pelicans and two-billion-year-old rock art above the waterline. He pursues her with the complete patience of a man who has been waiting for the right person without knowing it and who knows, by the third week, that the right person has arrived. He is warm and he is funny and he is the kind of certain that makes everything else feel uncertain by comparison. By week four, Stella has kissed him on the veranda under the Corner Country stars and understood that the restlessness had a specific answer and the answer was this. What follows is the love story of a woman who came for six weeks and stayed for the rest of her life, the competition prize that became the life, the six weeks that became the seasons, the teacher who became the remote education specialist and the station partner and the wife and the mother of Ruby Opal Callahan, who was born in November with the last wildflowers in the drainage lines and who would know the Corner Country from her first breath. Spanning four years of Corner Country seasons, the spring wildflowers and the summer heat and the autumn that exhaled and the winter stars, THE CORNER COUNTRY is a celebration of the specific joy of finding the thing that is fully yours, of a man who pursues with quiet relentless patience the woman he has been waiting for, and of the ancient, patient, always-more country that makes everything it touches more itself.