Cirrus@Austlit

'In 1979, at the age of fourteen, Ray McCullough ran away from his home on a western New South Wales sheep property following a violent confrontation with his dad, Jim McCullough. He left behind his mother, Delly, and his sisters, Ursula and Tilda.

'Now forty-one, Ray works as an itinerant cook and labourer across the remote outback. A practical man in love with history, landscape and solitude, he believes he suffers from an inherited streak of violence. A good man who thinks he is bad, Ray has spent his life running away from memories of family and home.

'When the body of a man is found in a country pub along with Ray's identification, Ursula once again takes up the search which has defined most of her adult life. It leads her first to her home town and a confrontation with her elderly father, then further, into far western NSW.

'Six months earlier, on hearing of the death of Delly McCullough, Ray embarks on a journey of his own, searching for Ursula and news of Delly, then meeting his father again for the first time in over thirty years. Along the way he is drawn unwillingly into a new life with troubled fourteen-year-old Mick and Mick's mother Lily, on their failing family farm near Bourke.' (Source: Publisher's blurb)

''They dragged her out of the lake at dawn. No jaw, one eye socket like some strange fish. The water was closing and closing, the centre blank as the tissue of a scar. Then, in a place a thousand miles from the ocean, they found something which might have been a seashell but which they knew was not. The lake gave birth regretfully, washing her up in slow burps.'

'A young woman and her baby go missing in an isolated Australian mining town. Two decades later human bones wash up in the local lake. The only clue is that a man driving a truck wearing a hat did it, in a town where every man wears something on his head.

'Twenty years later, Ruth returns to the place where she was born and where her mother was ostracised. Over that time an unexplored territory of guilty secrets centres on one man, Uncle Frank, whose silence has protected him but has also inflicted inconsolable wounds.The Water Underneath, told through the eyes of three women, separated by time, skin colour and allegiance, but united by their love of Frank, is about some of the conflicts which divide Australians, in the past and to this day.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.