e-Book The Great Inland Sea download

by David Francis

ISBN: 1596921161
ISBN13: 978-1596921160
Language: English
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage (May 10, 2005)
Pages: 247
Category: Genre Fiction
Subategory: Literature

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ePub size: 1261 kb
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Rating: 4.1
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The Great Inland Sea book. David Francis, based in Los Angeles where he works for the Norton Rose Fulbright law firm, spends part of each year back on his family’s farm in Australia.

The Great Inland Sea book.

David Francis' stark, beautifully crafted debut novel, "The Great Inland Sea," takes its title from a vast desert-like area . Past and present inevitably collide in The Great Inland Sea, where life consists of shattered memories, the anguish of not belonging, and the vignettes of a life once lived.

David Francis' stark, beautifully crafted debut novel, "The Great Inland Sea," takes its title from a vast desert-like area in Australia's New South Wales.

David Francis was born in the Mornington Bush Nursing Hospital in Victoria, Australia on November 12, 1958. Writing for The Washington Post, Jeff Turrentine described The Great Inland Sea as "a bowl of ripe cherries: graceful and unaffecte. e should be grateful for stories of this scale, crafted by writers of this skill".

The Great Inland Sea begins on two continents. Francis’s novel focuses so much of its energy on the important moments in its plot, and structures itself around these moments so singly, that it does not allow the reader to sink into any of the characters’ understandings. It opens with a page-long description of the narrator’s beloved Callie riding a horse through the surf of a Delaware beach, then shifts immediately to small-town Australia, approximately five years prior, where Day, the narrator, details the death and burial of his mother as perceived by his twelve-year-old eyes.

When he rode up Muddy Gates Lane, away from there, he didn't know that he was leaving, but he was sure he wasn't coming back. Day's journey took him to America, traveling as groom for a horse called Unusual. On the Eastern Shore of Maryland he meets Callie, who wants to be the world's first woman jockey. There is no doubt in her eyes, she knows about things that Day has never seen.

Published to great acclaim in six countries, The Great Inland Sea is a haunting novel about a boy who escapes the scorched Australian landscape of his youth with a horse called Unusual, and returns as an adult to nurse his ailing father, discovering the secrets long buried there. The Great Inland Sea is an evocative story of grace and compassion, of a boy's loss and enduring hope as he endeavors to forge connections with the world around him. It marks David Francis as a powerful new literary voice.

Find nearly any book by David Francis. Get the best deal by comparing prices from over 100,000 booksellers. by Diane August, Donald R. Bear, Janice A. Dole, Jana Echevarria, Douglas Fisher, David Francis, Vicki Gibson, Jan E. Hasbrouck, Scott G. Paris,. ISBN 9780021999637 (978-0-02-199963-7) Hardcover, l School Division, 2017. Find signed collectible books: 'California Treasures'. Discovering Exeter: Lost Churches (v. 7). by David Francis.

That Abulafia finds room for such an episode in a book of such ambitious scope . I had, at first, cocked an eyebrow at the book's subtitle – surely the word "human" is redundant?

That Abulafia finds room for such an episode in a book of such ambitious scope shows how impressive his achievement i. The religions and lifestyles of the inhabitants further inland may be different, but the pale blue of the fishing-boats; the eyes painted on the prows of the smaller vessels; the smell of frying sardines everywhere – these are constants, and I suspect that they have been so since antiquity. I had, at first, cocked an eyebrow at the book's subtitle – surely the word "human" is redundant?

or, THE INLAND SEA. By James Fenimore Cooper.

or, THE INLAND SEA. The idea ofassociating seamen and savages in incidents that might be ic of the Great Lakes having been mentioned to a Publisher,the latter obtained something like a pledge from the Author to carryout the design at some future day, which pledge is now tardily andimperfectly redeemed.

Day's mother died with her eyes wide open in 1947, near Maude, New South Wales. No doctor was called. Day watched his father drop her body into the red earth wrapped in a feed sack. He was only twelve. When he rode up Muddy Gates Lane, away from there, he didn't know that he was leaving, but he was sure he wasn't coming back.

Day's journey took him to America, traveling as groom for a horse called Unusual. On the Eastern Shore of Maryland he meets Callie, who wants to be the world's first woman jockey. There is no doubt in her eyes, she knows about things that Day has never seen. He is stranded by a love for Callie that takes him back to the harshness of his childhood in Australia, to the dark secrets of his family.

An exquisitely crafted and poignant story that reveals David Francis as a writer with an extraordinary gift for language.

Comments:

Hanad

I met this author in LAX, Los Angeles. I gave him a book which he graciously accepted and promptly began to read. In exchange, he gave me his card and explained that he had written this book. I misplaced the card, but never forgot the young man who had given it to me.

Once I located it again, I ordered this book from Amazon and it came quickly. I found it to be a good read. The author brings every page to life. It is a simple story with complicated characters. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys lessons taught by living.

Iriar

David Francis has written a stark, beautifully textured novel reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy. His understated and minimilist prose masterfully conveys his characters emotions with grace and humanity. A simple, haunting story of loss, love, and family.

Whatever

David Francis' stark, beautifully crafted debut novel, "The Great Inland Sea," takes its title from a vast desert-like area in Australia's New South Wales. This harsh, dry land was once, (hundreds of millions of years ago), a Great Inland Sea, where shells and fossilized sea creatures can still be found. Over the course of the narrative the reader discovers what our protagonist eventually learns in this unusual coming of age story, that people and things change. Neither the individuals who play a part in our lives, nor the events, are as predictable or as apparent as they seem. Day, a young man, is our narrator, and this is his story.

He left the family farm located near Maude, New South Wales, when he was twelve years-old. His father, Darwin, and his deceased mother, Emily, provided an emotional environment too dysfunctional for any child to thrive. Combined with the harsh physical climate, it's a wonder Day survived. He took-off after his mother's mysterious death, with just a pony to his name. Selling the animal in the nearest town, he made his way toward Melbourne, and found a job as a jockey along the way. He worked for the Delauney's at Sutton Grange for six years, breaking, exercising and caring for young thoroughbreds. Then, in 1953, he escorted a horse named Unusual to America.

On Maryland's eastern shore, Day meets Callie, a determined young woman, with a hard shell around her heart. She is set on becoming the first woman jockey...and a successful one at that! Day pours all his stored-up loneliness and intense yearning for love into his feelings for her. Emotionally scarred by a brutal childhood, Callie is not capable of reciprocating his love with much more than occasional affection, rejection and abuse. When thwarted, Day's feelings become obsessive. Again, his most critical needs, his overwhelming thirst for love, are met with a harsh, barren landscape. Haunted by his past in Australia, he returns to his father's farm and his mother's grave, to face his ghosts.

There he learns of his mother's girlhood in Vienna where she was an opera singer, and of a mysterious Argentinean man, Dickie Del Mar, who came to the farm once for an extended stay. Other than his mother, Del Mar was the only person Day remembers as showing him affection and paying him attention. Callie and Day remain in touch - usually by letter or telephone, the contact always instigated by him. Then she writes with an invitation. She asks him to travel to Mexico, to a horse show in Puebla. And so he leaves Australia for a second time, and initiates a scenario which puts the past and present on collision course.

The troubling story of Day's childhood, and the lives of his mother and father are darkly gothic in nature. A constant air of suspense permeates the narrative and Mr. Francis is unusually good at building tension and sustaining it. The prose is sparse but lyrical and the descriptions, especially of the Australian Outback, excite the senses and bring the landscape to life in the mind's eye. I am fascinated by the author's imagery of the sea, swimming and potential death by drowning - especially in the context of a desert environment.

"The Great Inland Sea" is a compelling, thought-provoking novel, and also a tautly written mystery. I eagerly await the author's next book and highly recommend this one.
JANA

Hono

Two women dominate this poignant novel: one is a ghost, a young boy's mother as she lives in his childhood memories, the second a wild young girl determined to be the first woman jockey. Day loves them both to distraction, Emily, the woman who slowly loses her wits in the barren landscape of Australia and the other, Callie, his constant companion in America. Both are unattainable, the mother because she now exists only in his thoughts and the other, who will not be tied down, following her dreams and determined wanderlust.

Day's Australia is as palpable as his yearning for connection, as isolated as his loneliness, "the views, the shapes of the trees and the angular cattle, the smell of the clothes dried hard in the sun." Day's father, Darwin, is a man of few words and cold comfort, a man who eventually ties his wife to her bed at night to keep her from wandering in her mental confusion. When Emily dies, Darwin wraps her in a rough sack, digs a grave and tosses her body in without a coffin, inscribing only her first name on the stone, "Emily-1947".

Throughout his wandering from Australia to America and back, Day searches for bits of the past, the smells and colors of his youth, images of his mother sewing, digging in her garden, heavy with pregnancy. He remembers the man who came to visit the young bride and new mother. Dickie DelMar, an Argentinean horseman, takes the place of Darwin in Emily's affections. Questions weigh upon Day, no matter where he is, all that he wants to ask Darwin about Emily, so little kindness between father and son that they barely speak, "I've carried him with me like a stone in my shoe."

Then there is the enigmatic, unreachable Callie, who has stolen Day's heart without uttering a word, his soul mate, he thinks, although her cruel distance remains implacable, if finally explicable. On the wet sand of the Delaware shore, Callie rides her horse hard, out into the ocean, as Day watches through fog-shrouded binoculars. The horse won't turn back, keeps swimming out to sea, but Callie returns to shore. Later, when the dead horse washes up on the beach, Callie says, "He wasn't going to be an important horse." Then walks away.

From the first page the reader is assaulted with stunning images, the language perfectly phrased, forming pictures in the mind's eye: "her sun-scorched arms like long gloves pulled up to her shoulders." There is a reckoning to be had in this sullen land of hard men and a woman too fragile to exist in their world, and a son who has known so little of love, that he chooses a partner as broken as himself, hoping the pieces will fit together. Until he unravels his conflicted feelings, Day is a prisoner of memory. But in the land of his childhood there are more answers than he ever dreamed. Luan Gaines/2005.