Turning Back The Sun: A Gripping Australian Frontier Love Story – Doctor and Independent Woman Fight for Survival

by Colin Thubron

“A moving lament for a vanished world and for the difficulties of human communication…a rewarding read.”     (Publishers Weekly)

“Intelligent and lyrical in its evocation of life on the fringe of civilization.”  (Library Journal)

Far away from the city of his birth, in a frontier town on the edge of tribal wilderness, a doctor tries to resolve the seemingly unreconcilable demands of his public career and his personal feelings. He believes his exile her to be temporary, and youthful memories of the distant city torment him with an unbearable sense of loss. Yet he has grown to love a fellow exile, a woman of fierce independence and strong will, who belongs by nature to the warmth and chaos of the frontier. But, during a summer of drought and disease, the desert erupts into savagery and he is at last confronted by the choice of returning to the city or of remaining with her.

Genres: Fiction, Travel, Australia

210 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Colin Thubron, CBE FRSL is a Man Booker nominated British travel writer and novelist.

In 2008, The Times ranked him 45th on their list of the 50 greatest postwar British writers. He is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Times, The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Times. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Thubron was appointed a CBE in the 2007 New Year Honours. He is a Fellow and, as of 2010, President of the Royal Society of Literature.

Reviews

[Don · Rating 3 out of 5]

Our central figure, Rayburn, struggles with the choice between commitment to an intense loving relationship and career as a doctor in a challenging racially charged context (an unnamed town in a place rather like the Australian Outback) and an opportunity to fulfill long yearning for a return to a life in the far-off Capital, his childhood friends and teen soul mate, Miriam. The story brings focus to in-group social pressures, stereotyping and scapegoating, attempts to communicate across language and cultural barriers.

[Mae · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was a quick novel to read.... But it lacked a good story line. It was more of a fable than a novel. The lesson wasn't all that well described either. It was lost in the complaining of the character. But it's been read so on to something else

[Daren · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. This is the second of Colin Thubron's fiction books I have been underwhelmed with. Love Thubron as a non-fiction writer, fiction falls flat so far.
Set in an anonymous location, which seems to be southern Africa, purposely disguised by using terminology like 'The Capital' and 'the town'. However it mentions desert, tribal indigenous people, gazelles, silver mining.
It speaks of race, and deals with relationships of the principal character Rayner with his childhood friends and his girlfriend.
It is a strange book, dealing with a series of murderers, the victims being white farmers and townspeople, by the indigenous people (called 'savages' in the book). This and a mystery disease which manifests itself as a brown skin growth.
We jump back and forwards - a bit of Rayner's history, some discussions with a psychologist (or psychiatrist), a bit of the current. He gets a letter, and has the opportunity to return to The Capital to inherit his aunts house and take up a job. He visits, catches up with some childhood friends, turns down the job to return to the Town.
For me the book just ends, without resolution.

Couple of edits. This is actually the third Thubron fiction novel I have read, all two stars.
I also see one of the other editions has a book description saying this is set in Australia. It could be - the 'savages' are certainly written in such a way as they seem far more Aboriginal than African, but the white character names are not very British (Rayner, Ivar, Leszec, Felicie etc), and the mention of gazelle doesn't tie... anyone know whether Thubron ever said?

[scherzo♫ · Rating 5 out of 5]

���On the early maps of this region the whole void south and east of the town was spanned by the one word: ���uninhabited.��� And people still behaved as if the savages did not exist. Most of them looked inexplicably old, like emanations of this land which the white men could not trust.���