Landed - A Novel

David Bateman Ltd 2023

It's the early 1990s in Timaru, and Brewer Howland has killed himself. His wife, Briar, is left stranded in a rapidly changing world. The future she took for granted has been obliterated and she must invent a new one. But how does a sixty-something widow go about creating a future for herself in a world she struggles to comprehend? She has taken a sharp right-hand turn into familiar territory, and everything seems to be rapidly changing: values, language, telephones, families, race relations, gadgets. Amid this tsunami of 'progress' Briar must decide how and where to live out her life. If her children and grandchildren had turned out to be lovingly bonded family cluster she'd hoped to raise they might have been future enough. But her children are scattered and disputations. Briar longs to return to the farmland where she grew up, but this seems unlikely. While she is trying to plan ahead, Briar's future is quietly taking on a shape of its own. Given time, and enough indecision, it seems an ominously sharp turn to the right can eventually lead you to just where you wanted to be. A wry, pensive, character-driven novel, Landed is Sue's first novel in decades....