On a farm on the edge of the endless, remote salt flats of Australia, an embattled family struggles in the midst of the Depression to scrape out an existence and survive the dust and despair. Regular visitors are few—only the Debt Adjuster and the wandering Indian hawker, Cabel Singh—until the day Eileen, a mysterious young woman, blows in from nowhere and alters the family’s precarious equilibrium. The boy is fascinated by her, his mother despises her, and Joe, the brutish farmhand and the boy’s idol, wants to possess her. When Eileen suddenly disappears, the only trace of her a torn and bloodied dress, the boy saddles up his horse, takes his pup, and sets out to find her.

Traveling through the bleak, unforgiving country, the boy encounters a bizarre array of lost souls scattered across the wasteland: a bone-collector living in a ghost town at the end of a gleaming new railway line; an isolated crew of Italian woodcutters who speak of an imprisoned husband, manacled by his wife in a farmhouse basement; a man on a bicycle who recalls his soldier days in Paris after the Great War; and river dwellers who take the boy to a pajama-wearing corpse lying aloft in a tree. Throughout these strange meetings, rumors of the enigmatic Cabel Singh drift like desert dust, and as the boy journeys on, he becomes aware of another party whose path is converging murderously with his own.

Set amid a haunting and broken landscape, where violence and beauty exist in equal measure, The Salt of Broken Tears is an achingly beautiful novel—of the inevitability of loss in the pursuit of desire and the hope that sustains in the midst of despair—that heralds the arrival of a major voice in contemporary fiction.