Grief and the mercurial nature of relationships make Outback Promise by Maggie Bolitho a powerful story of love and loss.

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 About the Book

(from the publisher)

Can Ros and Grady move on from the past, or will their pain drive them apart? Six years ago, the Balfours lost their son Cadel to a hit-and-run driver. A few months ago, Ros discovered Grady’s affair. With their marriage fast disintegrating, they decide to take a three-month camping trip into the heart of Australia to try and mend deep wounds and rekindle the fire that once fused them close. This trip will decide the fate of their relationship: do they have enough strength and enough love left to accept what life has put them both through? But trust and forgiveness don’t come easily, and Ros and Grady have to navigate not only the wilderness of the Outback and the challenges of other travellers, but also the chasm of grief and bitterness they have sunk into over the last six years. Their only hope for survival lies in facing the secrets they have both tried to keep buried

My Thoughts

Although the cover could suggest otherwise, this is not a rural romance. It is a beautifully written story of a crumbling marriage and the difficulty of finding your way through the indescribable loss of a child.

The Australian outback features heavily and for armchair travelers there is much to enjoy in the visual descriptions and experiences of the main characters. There is a vividness to these that suggest the journey through the Australian Outback is based on the author’s personal experience. Ros and Grady meet gregarious, sometimes bigoted, and at one stage outright scary, characters who add conflict to their already fragile relationship. The harsh, dusty landscape is a fitting metaphor for what their marriage has become since the tragic death of their son. Both have turned their grief inward and neither has been able to reach out to the other.

Bolitho has a subtle yet gut-punching way with emotion. You feel Ros’s anger at Grady and you understand the conflict she feels for this man she has loved for twenty years who is suddenly a stranger. Her grief over her son is so raw and heartbreaking that I sometimes had to skim these to be able to keep reading and not fall in a sobbing heap. Some of the early scenes to do with the trip and preparing for it were less interesting to me than the story of the breakdown of the marriage and what caused it.

This is a story that tackles a married relationship in a mature and realistic way. Ros’s predicament will speak to many of us and though Outback Promise is told only through her eyes and Grady’s motives and emotions stay somewhat opaque for much of their trip, he does get to say his piece. And it is here that we see his true vulnerability.

If you enjoy realistic characters dealing with real problems set against what for some will be an exotic background, Outback Promise is definitely for you.

Recommended.

*My copy courtesy of Maggie Bolitho and Harper Collins Impulse. I also own a copy.

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About the Author

Born in Victoria BC, Maggie set out to see the world shortly after her 17th birthday. She met and fell in love with a wild colonial boy, and, after five years of futile resistance, she moved to Melbourne, Australia and married him. While living Down Under, she started writing fiction. Some of her adult short stories have been published in different anthologies in the US, Canada, and Australia. She has had poetry published in Quills Canadian Poetry magazine.

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