Return to Dust by Dani Powell
$27.00
Product Details
About the book:
When Amber returns to her home in the Australian desert a year after her brother’s death, her hope is to move on from her grief, to start again. Invited to do some work in a remote Aboriginal community, she jumps at the opportunity to return to country she loves so deeply. She begins a three-day car trip on unsealed roads that link a constellation of Aboriginal communities. From the outset, it is as if she has been picked up by a willy willy on a windless day; and must be carried to the end of it, until the wind decides to drop.
Told like memoir, spun like myth, this is a philosophical tale about coming to terms with the death of a loved one, and finding home in people as much as place.
Praise for Return to Dust
Stranded between landscape and metaphor, searching for traction in the rituals of the western desert, a woman excavates memory and the archaeological evidence of an ancient catastrophe to come to terms with the death of her brother. Return to Dust is a haunting and poetic meditation on grief and the omnipresence of death in life.Kim Mahood
Return to Dust is a wise meditation on memory, grieving, time and place, the allure of landscape, belonging and displacement, and much more. It is graced with reflection, lyricism and depth of feeling, interwoven with a loving, respectful and honest depiction of friendship and engagement with Western Desert indigenous life. Powell seeks to connect across cultures, tracing the parallels, whilst honouring the differences as personified in one individual’s quest for reconciliation with the fragilities of life and death. Arnold Zable
Find out more about the author here >>>>
2022 NT Chief Minister’s Book Award for Fiction. Read more about here >>>
If you enjoyed Dani’s book, you might enjoy the following books:
We were not men by Campbell Mattinson
Salt River Road by Molly Schmidt
Watch our inteview with Dani Powell here >>>>
Publisher: UWAP
Publication: 1 April 2020
Format: Paperback, 180p
ISBN: 9781760801380
Category: Contemporary Fiction
