The World Beneath

Once Rich and Sandy were environmental activists, part of a world-famous blockade in Tasmania to save the wilderness. Now, twenty-five years later, they have both settled into the uncomfortable compromises of middle-age — although they’ve gone about it in very different ways. About the only thing they have in common these days is their fifteen-year-old daughter, Sophie.

When the perennially restless Rich decides to take Sophie, who he hardly knows, on a six-day walk into the Tasmanian wilderness, his overconfidence and her growing disillusion with him set off a chain of events that none of them could have predicted. Instead of respect, Rich finds antagonism in the relationship he hoped to create with Sophie, and, in the vast wilderness he once felt an affinity with, nothing but disorientation and fear. The uneasy truce established long ago between Rich and Sandy is shattered when he and Sophie leave the track to explore the remote terrain known as the Labyrinth.

As days pass with no word, all three characters begin to understand that if they are to survive, each must traverse not only the secret territories that lie between them but also those within themselves.