The Ruthless Garden

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The Ruthless Garden is an astonishingly assured first novel.Set in the Sout Australian Riveralnd this is a rich and often funny account of contemporary small town Australian life. On a cliff-top farm just outside the town of Newera, the enormously overweight and dominating Athena Masters is engaged in a power struggle with her inarticulate and emotionally illiterate lover, Sam.With pathos and humour, the novel explores the history of a doomed relationship and the history of the landscape. The original inhabitants, the Ngawaut Aborigines, saw the lands as a garden but the European settlers saw the land as a wilderness to be tamed.