Book description
'Gemmell has written a powerful novel that does not flinch from strong
emotion or description to provide a luminous insight into the fringes of
Australian society and the long, dark night of the soul' The Times 'The
desolate landscapes of central Australia, eerily beautiful and cruel,
are superbly evoked in Cleave. Nikki Gemmell's heroine, Snip Freeman, is
a painter who, as a child, lived in the centre until her father Bud
deserted her . . . Prompted by her grandmother, she heads west from
Sydney with a stranger, Dave, in search of Bud, her own childhood and,
perhaps, a new life. Gemmell writes brilliantly about the journey, about
Snip's insistence that she feels lust, not love, for Dave, and later
about Snip and her father marooned in the desert, both hallucinating as
they run out of water and hope' Sunday Time s
