Hollow Air

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Isolation can be hard on a person. It can be hard on the mind, especially when the bush closes in on you in the darkness of night. In the tin fields of Far North Queensland Sarah, a fly-in-fly-out Geologist, is working alone at a remote mine site. She spends her time in a sort of limbo, never quite fitting into her life at site or back home in Sydney with her fianc.

Strange things keep happening at the mine site, and Sarah can try to explain them away as the ramblings of a lonely mind. But there are dead bodies from a mining accident a century ago at the old Dulcie Ada mine, still buried beneath more than a hundred metres of rock.

Hollow Airexplores the effect of long periods of isolation on a persons mind, the experience of women in male-dominated industries and the friction that comes with the desire to understand the secrets of the Earth coupled with the knowledge that this can exact a toll.

PRAISE FOR HOLLOW AIR
Layered with suspense, subterfuge, and the fractures that absence can cause, Hollow Air moves seamlessly from life aboveground to the value of what lies beneath. Verity Borthwicks female FIFO engineer, Sarah, is tough-as-titanium and a total joy to read. A superb debut. Eleanor Limprecht, author ofThe Coast

The remote mining setting ofHollow Airinfuses this novel with mystery and drama right from the start as we anxiously watch its protagonist Sarah confront isolation and uncertainty, both professional and personal. Meanwhile, haunting events from a hundred years before slowly emerge to remind her and us that when the earth is violated it will inevitably seek revenge. In a beautifully paced story that never falters, Verity Borthwick explores the tensions between women and men, and the abrasive truth that the past is somehow never behind us. Debra Adelaide, author ofThe Womens Pages

Author Bio

Verity Borthwick has been published inThe Best Australian Stories,Meanjin,Island,The Furphy Anthology,TheUTS Writers Anthology, Aurealis,Science Write NowandVestal Review. She was the overall UTS 2022 Anthology Award winner and has been shortlisted for the Island Nonfiction Prize, the Furphy Literary Award and the Alan Marshall Short Story Award. When she is not writing, Verity works as a freelance editor and takes care of her two sons. She completed a Master of Arts in Creative Writing at UTS in 2021 and comes to writing from a background in Geology.