Unfinished Woman

Description

In 1977, while she was still in her twenties, Robyn Davidson set off with a dog and four camels to cross 1,700 miles of Australian desert to the sea. The undertaking would make her world-famous. What sets a young woman off on a path like this – thrilling, but often dangerous and lonely? What kept her walking, and what had she left behind her that meant that she could not look back?

In Unfinished Woman, Davidson embarks on another journey into uncharted territory: the past. In mesmerising prose, she conjures her childhood in post-war Australia: first a lone cattle station fringed with barbed wire, then a house called Malabah – where her father sheared sheep by hand while his daughters stamped it out in the wool press, where Robyn’s sister rode her horse to school, where green carpet snakes winked down from the ceiling rafters and where the house rippled with the sounds of her mother’s piano-playing. And then the deadening suburbia of Moreton – where Robyn returned home from school one afternoon to find that her mother’s music had stopped forever.

Spanning Australian deserts to Indian mountain ranges, sleeping rough in Sydney to the literary high tables of London, Unfinished Woman is the story of a mother and daughter through time: of their despair and survival, and their unbreakable bond with a land and a landscape that would define, scar and heal them. Angry, brave, sad and always beautiful, it is a powerful story of adventure, exile, homecoming – and a life lived in uncompromising pursuit of freedom.