The romance of bringing water to the desert is at the heart of this ambitious and kaleidoscopic novel, beautifully written in prose as slippery and sensuous as the life-giving liquid itself. A luxuriant and meditative narrative of the elemental and the sensual, the scientific and the miraculous, Robert Drewe has moved into the forefront of contemporary writing in English where myth, magic and melody coalesce in a fertile delta of the imagination. Spellbinding.