Unfinished Woman

(Paperback)

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In 1977, while she was still in her twenties, Robyn Davidson set off with a dog and four camels to cross 1,700 miles of Australian desert to the sea. The undertaking would make her world-famous. What sets a young woman off on a path like this thrilling, but often dangerous and lonely What kept her walking, and what had she left behind her that meant that she could not look back In Unfinished Woman, Davidson embarks on another journey into uncharted territory: the past. In mesmerising prose, she conjures her childhood in post-war Australia: first a lone cattle station fringed with barbed wire, then a house called Malabah where her father sheared sheep by hand while his daughters stamped it out in the wool press, where Robyns sister rode her horse to school, where green carpet snakes winked down from the ceiling rafters and where the house rippled with the sounds of her mothers piano-playing. And then the deadening suburbia of Moreton where Robyn returned home from school one afternoon to find that her mothers music had stopped forever. Spanning Australian deserts to Indian mountain ranges, sleeping rough in Sydney to the literary high tables of London, Unfinished Woman is the story of a mother and daughter through time: of their despair and survival, and their unbreakable bond with a land and a landscape that would define, scar and heal them. Angry, brave, sad and always beautiful, it is a powerful story of adventure, exile, homecoming and a life lived in uncompromising pursuit of freedom.

Reviews

Praise for Tracks: This will rank among the best of the books of exploration and travel and, like them, is a record of self-discovery and self-proving -- DORIS LESSING
An unforgettably powerful book, beautiful, thrilling and ferociously brave ... Davidsons timeless story of her astonishing journey gripped me from the first page to the last -- CHERYL STRAYED
It gets to the heart of landscape and solitude and becomes a venture to the interior of more than one dimension as its author approaches the hinterland of her own thorny psyche * OBSERVER *
An absorbing record of human endeavour and courage, a vivid picture of an extraordinary country by a perceptive and sensitive observer, and the story of an inner journey, of "shedding burdens" * SYDNEY MORNING HERALD *
As eccentric, undisciplined, flashily brilliant and pig-headed as its author ... Ms Davidson is a born writer, her book deeply moving * DAILY TELEGRAPH *
Vivid and vivacious ... Davidson is as natural a writer as she is an adventurer * NEW YORKER *

Author Bio

Robyn Davidson was born on a cattle property in Queensland. She went to Sydney in the late sixties, then returned to study in Brisbane before going to Alice Springs where the events of this book began. Since then she has travelled extensively and has lived in London, New York and India. In the early 1990s she migrated with and wrote about nomads in north west India. She is now based in Melbourne, but spends several months a year in the Indian Himalayas.