Road story - Julienne van Loon

Diana Kooper runs from a car crash in the heart of Sydney, scarcely looking back, leaving her best friend, Nicole, slumped and bloody in the damaged vehicle.

After hitching a ride to the far west of New South Wales, Diana takes a job as a kitchen hand at Bob's, an isolated truck stop. At first, she thinks she can predict the sort of rhythm her life will follow in this dusty, diesel-driven, lonely stop but soon a series of unsettling events disturb the order of things. A dog is brutally stabbed to death and left as a warning beside one of the petrol bowsers. And when Bob rolls his ute in suspicious circumstances, Diana is left to look after the roadhouse kitchen on her own. As every-day life becomes increasingly challenging, Diana struggles with her past and with the ghosts that haunt her present.

Road Story is a remarkable novel that reveals the tenuousness of love between friends and the dark pervasiveness of addiction.

'Compelling . . . the truckers, their habits, their rigs and their nonchalant ferocity come at you. She opens a window into the grit and diesel fumes of road-centred lives.' Stella Clarke

'Raw, direct and passionate, the assurance of van Loon's novel should distract no-one from the integrity and the intelligence which give weight to it.' James Bradley