Other Country: New Edition

Stephen Scourfield

‘Down here,’ he says, ‘that’s Australia.’ Then he points with a single, direct finger, above the line. ‘But up here. This is the other country.’

Linked by a common hatred of their violent Old Man, The Ace and his younger brother Wild Billy Parkes hit the road into northern Australia to make their own history. Two very different brothers, one held by the past, the other grasping for the future, they grow into men among tough blokes who prefer silence to emotions.

Their story, set in a landscape as harsh as the lives lived in it, is both desperate and filled with hope. There’s the other country that is out there, and there is the other country within; what you make of each is up to you.

Affecting and deeply resonant, Other Country is Stephen Scourfield’s award-winning first novel.

Read more about As the River Runs – Stephen Scourfield’s new outback novel.

Awards

Won – WA Premier’s Book Award for Fiction (2007)
Shortlisted – Commonwealth Writers Prize (2008)
Longlisted – International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (2009)

Praise for Other Country:

A gritty, textured novel, the spare direct prose, hard and sparkling as diamonds, concealing a poetry that sings of tough love for each other and for the land … Where Other Country was a masculine breathing out, As the River Runs is a more feminine breathing in. In that sense, both are not only gripping, but enriching, life-enhancing reads.

THE WEST AUSTRALIAN

 

The success of Other Country is also largely due to its voice, which is immediate, dramatic and stark. Poetic as well as vernacular, it suggests Proulx, McCarthy and other US writers for whom voice is, in many ways, story. Scourfield’s evident intimacy with the landscape and subjects that have inspired him percolates through every page of this impressive novel.

THE AUSTRALIAN

Book details

PUBLICATION DATE: 2013
FORMAT: Paperback
EXTENT: 320 pages
SIZE: 198 x 128 mm
ISBN: 9781742585031
RIGHTS: World
CATEGORY: Australian Studies, Fiction, Stephen Scourfield,