Featured Release
Australian Fiction
For Whom the River Runs is a novel set in a small country town in 1954. It is a tragic tale of power and prejudice and the trials and tribulations of two boys whose innocence is tested by an environment jaundiced by the harsh realities of manipulation, intolerance and rights-of-passage. It is a town where the fate of its inhabitants is wedded to the river that flows through its heart. Both feared and respected, the river's tranquillity and cloak of providence masks a lurking menace that rents the town asunder. Strategically, it defines the limits of privilege and spawned the social and political divide that had quietly festered throughout the ages. With its eight chapters, the novel takes the reader on a romp through the tenor of a small country town, where chicanery, defiance and humour define the ethos. It is a saga of small town local government and the machinations of a council steeped in conservative values, mired in subterfuge and controlled by an elite determined to maintain their status and wield power at all costs. It is a chronicle of two friends who, mocked and spurned by their contemporaries, find solace in each other's company. Who seeking redemption, embark on a ritual, if perilous, right-of-passage. Cameo appearances by Jericho Jack, Bury'em Barry, Mad Mick McGurk and a grave digger called Six Foot are the tint and glaze of Bowater's colourful canvas. A canvas framed in discord and draped in tragedy. It is into this vortex that the newly appointed Shire Secretary, his wife and young son are inexorably drawn.