The Family Made of Dust

In this thrilling debut novel ranked alongside Pulitzer winners, a gripping and poignant search for a missing best friend unearths the real emotional price one adopted boy paid for a government's attempt at genocide.

Gabriel Branch is a man displaced. Having lost his boyhood family to brutal adoption policies, his carefully constructed adult life balances on an emotional razor's edge. Then his best friend disappears in the vast desert that is Australia's interior. The only clue is an Aboriginal artifact that leads Gabe back to the land of his birth.

As he searches for the friend who was like a brother, memories arise unbidden. Memories of the uncle who swung him up into a tree and called him Little Breeze. Memories of the mother he lost. Memories of the sickly sweet candy social workers used to steal him away to an orphanage where he and his brother were separated first by walls and then by different adoptions. Armed only with his totem animal, Gabe must find real peace before a tribal shaman and the weight of his past crush him completely.

Eerily mysterious, vast, dangerous and beautiful, The Family Made of Dust is a remarkable story about the special relationships families can hold dear even when they have been broken apart...and how a spare and beautiful landscape imbued with the mystical energy of the Dreamtime can resurrect that which we hold so dear.

Fans of Sara Gruen's At the Water's Edge will appreciate the suspenseful elements and fabulist mysteries while readers of Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees will feast on the details of lives that are so different and yet so similar to their own.