WILL COMBINE BOOKS TO SAVE POSTAGE IF POSSIBLE - SOFT COVER=MID SIZE-NO TEARS OR INSCRIPTIONS-SOME FOXING DUE TO AGE-John Clanchy is an award-winning Canberra counsellor and academic at the Australian National University. He has published five novels and three collections, and short stories in magazines, newspapers and anthologies. His novel He was won the ACT Book of the Year twice for The Hard Word in 2003 and for his collection of stories Vincenzo's Garden in 2006 (which also won the Steele Rudd Award in 2005). He also writes detective thrillers in collaboration with Mark Henshaw. Abstract..."She had come to him shortly after he had taken up the farm. Fifteen years, but the day was full of hope and he remembered it like yesterday. She had tumbled down from the truck, long-legged and spindly like a young girl, and stood in the paddock before him, her eyes bright and wild with fear at the bare endless spaces about her. She had never left her mother's side before, on a coastal farm, ordered, small-fielded, lush and English. But this brown vacancy could swallow her whole, her body seemed to say, there was nothing to hold her in. It was days before she allowed his hands on her.