Brett Evans

But there's only one way I can stop, and I'm not ready for that.

I step out of my ute into the heat, and notice again there is a faint organic stink on the air, like a whiff from a long-dead animal.

I can't place it, and I don't care to.

Well, as you can tell from that opening paragraph, you know, he thinks of himself as a loser and a lot of bad things have happened to him.

He's a farmer.

There's been a tragedy in his family which has torn apart his marriage.

The woman Sarah mentioned there is his ex-wife who's run off to the city and is now in another relationship with a woman.

And he's drinking himself to death very slowly and he's isolating himself from...

from his community.

And that's the underlying sort of theme running through the book, which is a very common theme, I think, in rural life.

The pressures of the drought and economic circumstances mean that farmers, I think, have a higher rate of suicide than many other Australians.

So he's in this circumstance.

Then these boxes arrive and the first box, and it's not much of a spoiler because it happens virtually in the third page, is full of money.

Now, if I found a box full of money, you'd be happy and then you'd start to think and you'd think, oh, no, this can't be good because this is not my money and it's come to me by mistake.

You might think that, Brett.

Well, some of us are more moral than others, I think, Cassie.

And then more boxes come and they contain ashes.

And so there's this weird Kafka goes to the bush sort of feel at the beginning, which is that this man who's in a crisis in his life is soon to be inundated with so many boxes, his whole farm will be filled with it.

So that's the mystery.

You know, it's a very intriguing start to a book.