Fred Scully waits at the arrival gate of an international airport, anxious to see his wife and seven-year-old daughter. After two years in Europe they are finally settling down. He sees a new life before them, a stable outlook again, a fresh start, a cottage in the Irish countryside that he's renovated by hand. He's waited, sweated on this reunion. He does not like to be alone - he's that kind of man. The flight lands, the glass doors hiss open, and Scully's life begins to go down in flames. So begins an odyssey across Europe, a journey through the underworld of every lover's nightmare, as father and daughter, isolated from each other by terror and need, desperately search the wreckage of their lives for answers.
This is a story of a marriage in our time. Of a man who would go to the end of the earth for a woman and their tough little nut of a child - and of a woman who must let them pass blindly by. Written with the sort of grace and irresistible clarity we have come to expect from one of our best loved and most talented writers, *The Riders* is Tim Winton's first adult novel since Cloudstreet. AAA