People collide with place in Nicole Alexander’s stories from the Australian bush.
Nicole Alexander writes what she lives, works and knows: big stories for a big sky country. A fourth-generation grazier, Alexander lives and works on her family's Boomi NSW property, and many of her sweeping stories of love, tragedy and redemption take place in similar outback settings.
If it is the unique, often inhospitable landscapes and locations that form the skin and bones of Alexander’s stories, it’s relationships that are the lifeblood. Whether presenting family sagas or portraying the trials of farm life experienced across a single week, her novels reveal a deep affection for the land, and an even deeper appreciation of what makes us tick.
‘Every generation is meant to improve on the one that’s come previously, which is an impossibility really because all of us have flaws, all of us have different strengths and weaknesses,’ she says of what inspires her to write large-scale epics. ‘So that makes character development very interesting when you follow the story of a genetic line down through the generations. Of course, if you pitch those characters against a historical background, you see not only how they relate to the events that are occurring around them at the time but also how they’re changing and adapting to different situations in comparison to the way those people who have gone before them did.’
Alexander’s body of work to date traverses multiple timelines and periods, several Australian states and territories, and reaches as far as the trenches of the Great War and the American Wild West. Here’s an introduction to her novels thus far.
The Cedar Tree (2020)
In the spring of 1949, Stella O’Riain flees her home – a sheep property on the barren edge of the Strzelecki Desert. She leaves behind the graves of her husband Joe and her baby daughter. With no money and limited options, Stella accepts her brother-in-law Harry’s offer to live at the O’Riain cane farm in the Richmond Valley. There she hopes to get answers to the questions that plague her about her marriage.
Stone Country (2019)
South Australia, 1919. Ross Grant has always felt like the black sheep of his wealthy Scottish family. An explorer at heart, he dreams of life on Waybell, their remote cattle station in Australia’s last remaining wilderness, the Northern Territory.
An Uncommon Woman (2017)
It’s 1929, and for Edwina Baker, life on her family’s farm in Western Queensland offers little opportunity to be anything other than daughter, sister and, perhaps soon, wife… Edwina wants more. The question is, how far is she prepared to go, and how much is she prepared to risk?
River Run (2016)
January 1951: after a year away Eleanor Webber has returned home to her family’s sprawling sheep property in western New South Wales. With the shearing of 25,000 sheep about to commence, a storm looming and tensions rising in the shearing shed, a mysterious stranger appears on the horizon.
Wild Lands (2015)
An epic novel of bravery, loyalty and impossible love that takes readers on a journey from the streets of early Sydney to the heart of Australia’s wild, untamed lands.
The Great Plains (2014)
A journey from the American Wild West to the wilds of outback Queensland, from the Civil War to the Great Depression, in an epic novel tracing one powerful but divided family.
Sunset Ridge (2013)
Three brothers take an adventure from the drought-stricken outback of Queensland to the horror of the trenches in World War One. Amidst bravery and misadventure, intolerance and friendship, emerges a story of three young men who went to war and fought for love.
Absolution Creek (2012)
One man lost her. One man died for her. And one would kill for her... From the gleaming foreshores of Sydney Harbour to the vast Australian outback, this is a story of betrayal and redemption and of an enduring love which defies even death.
A Changing Land (2011)
The story of Sarah Gordon’s fight to keep the farm that has been in her family for generations. What cost to your own happiness comes with keeping your family legacy alive?
The Bark Cutters (2010)
Past and present interweave in a story that traces the Gordon family from the arrival of Scottish immigrant Hamish Gordon in Australia in the 1850s to the life of his great-granddaughter, Sarah. Embarking on a new life in Sydney, and trying to put the past behind her, will the pull of the property that has been in her family for over 120 years be too great to resist?
