A Sand Archive

An unnamed young writer, hunting for stories about the building of the Great Ocean Road in Victoria, comes across a slim, cheaply produced handbook by FB Herschell, an engineer who played only a small part in the road's past. The manual is unremarkable, yet behind its prose stands a curious figure, engineer, historian and thinker, who writes about sand as if it were poetry. The deeper the narrator digs through Herschell's papers, the more the man eclipses the road. His trail leads to Paris during the upheavals of May 1968, where a personal turning point reshapes how Herschell regards love, living and the stretch of coast where he was born. Around this quiet obsession the book considers how storms, tides and social turmoil alter landscapes and people over the generations.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Length

320 pages in the original

Genres

Nature (assigned by AI)

Set in

Australia, France, 1968

First published

2018

ISBN

9781760552145 (Picador Australia, Australia)