A Far-flung Life is a tale about family and belonging, fate and time. It is about people trying to do their best, and each, for private reasons, seeking shelter from the storm of life.
What separates great literature from cheap melodrama is not the grief the story contains, but whether the writing has earned it. Stedman lands every blow thanks to her patient accumulation of ordinary life, the shearing and mustering and fence-mending, the slow mapping of relationships that ensures each loss registers as something more than plot machinery.
Ticks through a chronology of happiness and disaster as inexorably as the old grandfather clock in the homestead ... Stedman is supremely adept at pursuing this theme, as she traces the tragedy of these endearing, painfully responsible characters ... Taking the sheep shears to some of the hind parts of this novel would have improved its pacing without sacrificing its power. But such is the nature of Stedman’s storytelling that I never resented her a page.
This sweeping saga, told with great heart and tenderness, is a story of broken people working to heal themselves. The many admirers of Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans will find the same blend of sadness and hope in her latest.
