Magpie by Alan Ryan

Magpie by Alan Ryan

Fear and love in the Australian Outback.

Jim Macken talks to trees. He dances around the fire and has made peace with the flies. In a bid to escape a mundane life, the broken-hearted Irish backpacker has gone walkabout in the West Australian Goldfields. The scorched land is hurting. The summer rains never came and the temperatures soar.

On a rare trip to the remote Aurora Inn, the young Irishman watches a tainted icon fall, while another, released from twenty-seven years in prison, walks free. An assault brings the day to a premature close. Jim sleeps across the wide front seat of his beat-up truck. A body lies in the dirt. The evidence, much of it manufactured, suggests Jim is a killer and Kelly Porcini, the disillusioned barmaid, is an accessory to murder.

Fearing for their lives, Jim and Kelly, flee into the hostile interior of the continent. Along the way the young couple find a beautiful but damaged country. There is the possibility of love and the opportunity for betrayal. Ultimately, an ancient and indigenous Dreamtime landscape may decide how their stories end.

Alan Ryan was the warden of New College, University of Oxford, where he was a professor of political theory, after decades at Princeton University. He is the author of several books, including John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism and Bertrand Russell: A Political Life.