Great Inland Sea

Jeff Turrentine

Small, direct and unself-conscious, it's the sort of novel that tends to get drowned out amid the noise of today's literature-making machine. But we should all be grateful for stories of this scale, crafted by writers of this skill.
— The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

The twisted relationship between a jockey and the horse jumper who becomes the object of his obsession frames Francis's dark, brooding debut, which traces the path of the would-be lovers as they pursue careers in 1950s East Coast horse culture. Both are young Aussie emigr s escaping family demons. Narrator Day has fled a New South Wales childhood marked by his father's erratic responses to his mother's deteriorating mental health. The beautiful, damaged Callie is an incest victim who dreams of becoming America's first professional female jockey. Day and Callie both begin to have success, but get caught using illegal tactics to prepare a horse for competition. Their relationship is just as troubled; despite an inarticulate attraction, Day and the aloof, unpredictable Callie have trouble consummating their affair, and Day's corrosive jealousy of Callie's other suitors leads to separation. A charged trip together back to Australia closes the novel. Francis's jittery, cinematic narrative jumps episodically between places and times, but he effectively uses macabre imagery to capture the essence of the flawed, ambiguous relationship, and makes excellent contrasts between the Australian and American settings. (Now a Los Angeles lawyer, Francis grew up in Australian horse country.) The equestrian material is solid, if underdeveloped. Francis's mix of vivid imagery and fluid emotion shows real promise. Agent, Nicole Aragi. (May) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A bleak coming-of-age debut set in 1940s New South Wales. Narrator Day, the son of a Viennese Jewish soprano and a rough monosyllabic Scotsman, is 12 when he witnesses his father, Darwin, tying and gagging his mother in bed each night. His mother had been in declining mental health for several years, since a miscarriage and her discovery that her husband was having an affair with Lelonie, a woman who lives and works on their ranch. Then one night, Day sees his father bury his mother in the red sand on the rise by the billabong. She has suffocated. Day runs away, first to the mud brick hut of Leonie, who takes him in overnight (hiding under her bed when his father appears, he finds himself the unwilling witness to their lovemaking). Then he heads to Melbourne, gets a job working with horses and dreams of being a jockey. At 18, he is shipped to a horse farm in Maryland, along with a racehorse named Unusual. He works hard, meets a girl by the name Callie, who also wants to be a jockey, and is drawn into a nocturnal game in which Callie, her groom and he take bets and run races for money. Day is haunted by memories of his mother and of Dickie, the man she seemed attracted to (and who may be his father). Meanwhile, Callie takes off, and Day finds her only six months later, but it seems she's with another man. He moves to L.A., trains horses, then heads back to Australia, confronts his father and learns some family secrets. Callie sends for him to ride in a race in Mexico, and together they track down Dickie in Santa Barbara. This odd threesome heads down to Australia when Darwin has a stroke. With all the players in one place, Day learns how far he can trust Callie, Dickie and Darwin. Spareprose, startling images and an emotional landscape as harsh as the setting.