Publishers Weekly
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This family tragedy from bestseller Stedman (The Light Between Oceans) is captivating and distressing in equal measure. Set on a sheep station in remote Western Australia, where the MacBride family leases nearly one million acres and tends to 20,000 sheep, the novel begins in 1958 when a truck accident kills the family’s patriarch and eldest son and leaves the youngest son, 17-year-old Matt, severely injured. Saddled with cognitive issues and memory loss, he faces a long road to recovery under the care of his mother, Lorna, and 20-year-old sister, Rose. Months later, a confounding drunken incident exacerbates the tragedy, forcing Matt to cover up terrible secrets. It would spoil the novel to reveal more, beyond that during this time, Lorna’s grandson, Andy, enters the picture, brightening the MacBrides’ gloom with his youthful enthusiasm and love of geology. By 1969, new arrival Bonnie Edquist, a surveyor for a mining company, threatens to upend Matt’s safe and quiet way of life, while a nosy postmistress and a self-righteous police officer start to uncover his closely guarded secrets. Stedman conveys the staggering scale of the sheep station’s isolated sprawl, and it’s impossible to look away from the grim series of events. Readers will be transported. Agent: Susan Armstrong, Conville & Walsh. (Mar.)

Library Journal
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For generations, members of the MacBride family have lived and prospered on their vast sheep station in remote Western Australia. However, their good fortune seems to run out in 1958, when a kangaroo crosses the path of the truck that is carrying Phil MacBride and his two sons. In the ensuing crash, Phil and his older boy are killed instantly, while Matt, the younger son, clings to life. Although Matt survives, a traumatic brain injury leaves him with a patchy memory and an altered personality. More tragedies crop up for the remaining MacBrides, and a shocking encounter leads to daughter Rose's unwanted pregnancy. Soon after the birth of her son, she throws herself down a mine shaft. Unwilling to cause the family more grief, the pragmatic police chief rules her death an accident. In time, life improves as Matt regains mental stability while helping his mother run the station and care for Rose's son. But the arrival of a new by-the-books police chief, who means to reopen irregular cold cases, threatens to expose old secrets. VERDICT This sweeping saga, told with great heart and tenderness, is a story of broken people working to heal themselves. The many admirers of Stedman's The Light Between Oceans will find the same blend of sadness and hope in her latest.—Barbara Love

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

The accident that takes the lives of Matthew MacBride’s father and older brother also, in its own way and over time, claims his and his sister Rosie’s as well. On a desolate road in the relentless darkness of a Western Australian night, Matthew is thrown clear of their truck, his body mangled, his mind a tangled warren of incomplete memories and erratic emotions. Rosie should have been there in his place, but she finagled a way to stay home, and her survivor’s guilt becomes all-consuming. Over the course of a half-century, beginning in 1958, the tragedy’s consequences will impact the lives of everyone associated with the MacBride ranch, including Rosie’s unborn son, Andrew; their ranch hand, Pete; and Bonnie, a mining company representative whose affections Matthew dares not accept. The author of the immensely popular The Light between the Oceans (2012), Stedman again plumbs the vast Australian landscape as a metaphor for the depths of the human psyche as she considers the influences of destiny, loyalty, and remorse with ardent compassion.

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Tragedy strikes a remote Australian sheep-farming family, with consequences that will ripple through generations. Fourteen years after her notable debut,The Light Between Oceans (2012), Australian-born author Stedman returns with a decades-spanning epic featuring the MacBride family, “sensible but shrewd, careful but not mean,” who have occupied Meredith Downs in Western Australia for years. Their spread covers nearly a million acres and contains 20,000 sheep. But the vehicle crash that takes place in January 1958 plunges the well-ordered sheep station into turmoil. Bereaved widow Lorna MacBride must take over management of the enterprise, while nursing her son Matt back to health, a job she shares with daughter Rosie. Yet the pain, grief, and reorientation don’t end there. More heartbreak ensues, driven by a terrible secret that will haunt Matt like a curse. Lorna’s grandson, Andy, is the one bright spark in the family as he grows into a quick, likable youth with a passion for geology, a useful connection when, in the 1960s, during the Australian mining boom, geologist Bonnie Edquist and her team start exploring the Meredith Downs lands. Stedman’s novel evokes the immensity of the landscape, its flora and fauna, the exhausting work of running a sheep station, and the sparse population of the community, all in attentive detail, but the dark lineaments of her story and their corrosive effects hang heavy over its pages. Other secrets dot the novel, several of them intensified by the norms of the era. The reader is teased with the possibility of truths emerging from several directions, including a nosy postmistress and a punctilious policeman, but secrecy persists, both a burden and an enduring act of self-sacrifice. Though less emotionally compelling than the author’s previous novel, this is a work of intense moral commitment, constantly devoted to the sympathetic exploration of private pain. A heartfelt saga weighed down by gloom and periods of stasis. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.