Hollow Air

Isolation can be hard on a person. It can be hard on the mind, especially when the bush closes in on you in the darkness of night. In the tin fields of Far North Queensland Sarah, a fly-in-fly-out Geologist, is working alone at a remote mine site. She spends her time in a sort of limbo, never quite fitting into her life at site or back home in Sydney with her fiance.

Strange things keep happening at the mine site, and Sarah can try to explain them away as the ramblings of a lonely mind. But there are dead bodies from a mining accident a century ago at the old Dulcie Ada mine, still buried beneath more than a hundred metres of rock.

Hollow Airexplores the effect of long periods of isolation on a person’s mind, the experience of women in male-dominated industries and the friction that comes with the desire to understand the secrets of the Earth coupled with the knowledge that this can exact a toll.

PRAISE FOR HOLLOW AIR
‘Layered with suspense, subterfuge, and the fractures that absence can cause, Hollow Air moves seamlessly from life aboveground to the value of what lies beneath. Verity Borthwick’s female FIFO engineer, Sarah, is tough-as-titanium and a total joy to read. A superb debut.’- Eleanor Limprecht, author ofThe Coast