Ladder Trick — Lesley Glaister

Opportunity for the Right Applicants. Housekeeper/companions required. Would suit young couple. Remote, rural location. Cooking, cleaning, gardening and caring duties. Applicants must be self-sufficient and resourceful. It seems like the perfect job for Cassie and Graham. She wants an adventure before she has a child. A year away might convince Graham to settle down, curb his roving eye. Graham seeks inspiration for his painting. He wants Cassie but he wants freedom too - a balancing act as difficult as the ladder trick he tries to perfect. This could be the answer. But Woolagong Station, at the edge of the desert, is eeriely further away from civilisation than they expected. Larry, their smooth, enigmatic employer, runs his house in a discomfiting fashion. Why is there no radio? Why is there no post from home? Why does Mara, his wife, live sedated in a shed? And how does Larry intuit things he could not possibly know? Everything warps under the blazing Australian sun - their sense of direction, their sex drives, even their sense of right and wrong. And the freedom to roam soon begins to feel like a dangerous prison Brilliantly evoking the paranoia and menace lurking behind the most innocent seeming landscape, Lesley Glaister writes of human behaviour at its most edgy and unnerving. As Far As You Can Go sees her at the top of her form - darkly erotic and utterly riveting.