Cynthia was just about to turn sixteen when the unthinkable happened. Her mother was taken away by the police and her father left without a word three months later. After that night Cynthia began to walk in slow circles outside the family home looking for traces of her sister Mallory. Cynthia knows that she doesn't belong here. Her mother never belonged here either. This is a place of violence. Despair. Blood caked under the nails. Desperate men. Long silences. The place where mothers go mad in locked bedrooms where women like Cynthia imagine better futures. As a threatening wind begins to dry-whirl around her seldom-seen black clouds form above rolling over the golden-brown land. Is that Mallory she can hear in the growling mass? In the harsh drought-stricken landscape of outback Queensland women can be lost in so many ways. Will Cynthia be one of them?
