Fred Scully waits at the arrival gate of an international airport, anxious to see his wife and 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. The flight lands. The doors at the airport hiss open. And Scully’s life falls to pieces.

The world Tim Winton paints in Scission is often harsh and disturbing, inhabited by isolated, unforgiving characters. It is a world at once familiar, filled with the trappings of home and family, and yet also strangely twisted – a world where casual brutality and unexpected death are never far from the surface. Evident in a young girl’s violent temper once the eggs she has so jealously guarded finally hatch, or in the careless indifference of the woman stepping over a soldier’s spreadeagle...