The Woolgrower’s Companion

'A heart-breaking love story from a great new voice' Saga

Australia 1945. Until now Kate Dowd has led a sheltered life on her family's sprawling sheep station but, with her father's health in decline, the management of the farm is increasingly falling to her.

Kate is rising to the challenge when the arrival of two Italian POW labourers disrupts everything – especially when Kate finds herself drawn to the enigmatic Luca Canali.

Then she receives devastating news. The farm is near bankrupt and the bank is set to repossess. Given just eight weeks to pay the debt, Kate is now in a race to save everything she holds dear.

Over the course of one year, Kate finds a strength and defiance she never knew she had in this fascinating debut novel Red Magazine
A story of survival and forbidden love, this hooks you in from the atmospheric first pages, and will have you rooting for the feisty heroine Sunday Mirror
A heart-breaking love story from a great new voice -- Sue Price Saga
A novel about endurance and a stubborn will to survive, it is written with passion and intensity that is hugely attractive -- Elizabeth Buchan
This sweeping epic set in rural New South Wales is about love, family and testing your mettle -- and it's compulsively readable. Just the thing for those lazy summer days Marie Claire Australia
Full of moral dilemmas, brutality, and humanity, this is a terrific first novel that illuminates and unknown corner, while creating characters who can and cannot change their minds Frances Fyfield, judging the 2018 McKitterick Prize
An easy-to-read tale of Australian rural life and family drama ... Rhoades paints a vivid picture of the Australian bush, the strict social code, snobbery and racism -- Sue Barraclough Irish News
Full of fine descriptions and multi-faceted characters, this is a convincing portrayal of life in 1940’s outback Australia and an engaging read Choice
The descriptions of life on a 1940s Australian sheep station are authentic, as are all the characters that inhabit this often confronting landscape... Its honesty and truth shine through on every page, and it deserves the highest recommendation Historical Novels Review
Be immersed in the harsh, rugged romance of the Aussie bush, thanks to a wonderful new voice in literary rural fiction Australian Women's Weekly

Joy Rhoades was born in a small town in the bush in Queensland, Australia, with an early memory of flat country and a broad sky. Growing up, she loved two things best: reading and the bush, often climbing a tree to sit with a book. Her family would visit her grandmother, a fifth-generation grazier and a gentle teller of stories of her life on her family’s sheep farm.

At 13, Joy left for Brisbane, first for school and then to study law at university. After graduating, she worked all over the world as a lawyer. It was in New York that she completed a master's degree in Creative Writing at the New School University, and the people, the history, and the landscape of her childhood led her to start writing The Woolgrower's Companion.

She now lives in London with her French husband and their two young children, but she misses the Australian sky.

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