A Far-Flung Life
What separates great literature from cheap melodrama is not the grief the story contains, but whether the writing has earned it. Stedman lands every blow thanks to her patient accumulation of ordinary life, the shearing and mustering and fence-mending, the slow mapping of relationships that ensures each loss registers as something more than plot machinery.
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Ticks through a chronology of happiness and disaster as inexorably as the old grandfather clock in the homestead ... Stedman is supremely adept at pursuing this theme, as she traces the tragedy of these endearing, painfully responsible characters ... Taking the sheep shears to some of the hind parts of this novel would have improved its pacing without sacrificing its power. But such is the nature of Stedman’s storytelling that I never resented her a page.
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Carries a deep sense of place and a reverence for ordinary people living close to the land ... The setting is rendered with extraordinary care ... Stedman has a real gift for description, and her prose anchors the story firmly in place ... Remarkably, this is only Stedman’s second novel, though it reads with the assurance of a much more experienced writer ... There are moments where the plot takes somewhat incongruous turns, and a few resolutions feel tidier than real life might allow. The pacing is also a little slow in places ... Ultimately, this is an uplifting, moving and utterly absorbing novel.
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