'This week we’re delighted to bring you an extract from Dani Powell’s debut novel Return to Dust. As the title suggests, it is a novel about grief, but it is also a vivid and intimate portrait of the landscape and people of central Australia. Of long road trips with unexpected detours, and life in remote Indigenous communities. The red dust of the desert spills from its pages as we follow Amber, who has returned to Mparntwe/Alice Springs, still mourning the death of her brother.
'When Amber first arrived in the town 10 years earlier, she’d felt ‘a sense of coming home that made no sense’ as she’d been born thousands of miles away. Now she has come back to take up a job in a remote community and once again feels her connection to this place, ‘the on and on of it. The ground so solid, the sky so sure.’
'In this extract, Amber is still on her way to the job in the remote community, but has been sidetracked by a football match, by giving rides to old friends – including Jennifer and her young daughter Shyanna – and a funeral. She has spent the night in Jennifer’s community, and needs to get moving again.' (Introduction)
