Product Description

Opportunity for the Right Applicants. Housekeeper/companions required. Would suit young couple. Remote, rural location. Cooking, cleaning, gardening and caring duties. Applicants must be self-sufficient and resourceful. It seems like the perfect job for Cassie and Graham. She wants an adventure before she has a child. A year away might convince Graham to settle down, curb his roving eye. Graham seeks inspiration for his painting. He wants Cassie but he wants freedom too - a balancing act as difficult as the ladder trick he tries to perfect. This could be the answer. But Woolagong Station, at the edge of the desert, is eeriely further away from civilisation than they expected. Larry, their smooth, enigmatic employer, runs his house in a discomfiting fashion. Why is there no radio? Why is there no post from home? Why does Mara, his wife, live sedated in a shed? And how does Larry intuit things he could not possibly know? Everything warps under the blazing Australian sun - their sense of direction, their sex drives, even their sense of right and wrong. And the freedom to roam soon begins to feel like a dangerous prison Brilliantly evoking the paranoia and menace lurking behind the most innocent seeming landscape, Lesley Glaister writes of human behaviour at its most edgy and unnerving. As Far As You Can Go sees her at the top of her form - darkly erotic and utterly riveting.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #496210 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

Review
'Glaister, along with Ruth Rendell, has almost cornered the market in horror stories.' The Times 'Skeletons fairly rattle in her fictional cupboards.' Independent 'Terrifying Glaister truffles her way down to the grim heart, where we find out what makes people tick like time-bombs.' Daily Telegraph

The Scotsman, 20th March
'Glaister is an expert plotter and her story has a chilling plausibility.'

Prize Magazine
"Filled with suspense and menace, 'As Far As You Can Go' is a riveting psychological drama."

Customer Reviews

A white-knuckle rollercoaster ride of a novel!
For much of the reading of this book I could barely bear to turn thepages, but at the same time, I couldn't put it down. It is quite thesimply the most breathlessly exciting story I've read in ages, as sexy andvivid as it is chilling and disturbing.
The tale begins with a job advertisement in a paper, asking for a coupleto help run an old sheep station in a remote part of Australia. Cassie andGraham take the job in a bid to save their troubled relationship, but theyare about to find out what 'trouble' really means. As soon as they arrive,there is the strong sense that things aren't going to run at all smoothly.Larry is too clever, too clean, and his 'meaty' wife Mara seems to spendher days sedated and sweaty in a shed. There is a uneasy feeling ofmalevolence and claustrophobia in their surroundings, despite the beautyand expanse of the outback. And if the interaction between the four maincharacters is awkward to begin with, it quickly escalates to a primalhotbed of desires and hatreds and fears, leading to breathless andshattering consequences.
This book is an erotic and psychological thriller, but there is also ahorror story quality about it. Glaister mixes a good dose of dark humourinto the novel too, alleviating the fright-factor with quaint Englishtouches. She has an amazing insight into what makes people tick, makingher characters more believable, and this, in turn, cranks up the tensioneven more.
This is a thrilling book that I highly recommend to any reader who likes abit more bite to their bedtime stories.

A brilliant, intense psychological thriller
A sinister and intense story of voyeurism and manipulation, 'As far as you can go' will keep you awake at night - if not out of fear then out of an unstoppable need to turn the last page.

A young British woman, Cassie, answers an advert asking for a couple to spend a year at a remote farmstead in outback Australia to work as housekeepers and companions to a man and his wife. She persuades artist boyfriend Graham to embark on the adventure in the hope of testing his commitment to her following an infidelity. On arrival, however, their total isolation comes as a shock, they send but never receive any letters, and they find themselves increasingly prone to paranoia and a feeling that they are being 'watched'.

Creepy boss Larry seems to be keeping secrets from them, including the reasons for the departure of their predecessors and the real nature of his wife Mara's alleged mental illness. Meanwhile, Mara is exiled to a converted shed where she lives in virtual darkness - apart from her occasional naked jaunts into the outside world where her tranquillized state becomes obvious.

When Larry quizzes Cassie about her 'test' of Graham's reliability as a boyfriend, and offers her pharmaceuticals to help 'stabilise' his personality, the reader starts to get a sense of quite how disturbing Larry's character is. And Graham is being 'tested' enough as it is - Mara has demanded painting lessons from him, and he has discovered that she doesn't want to paint, she wants to be painted - and not on canvas, on her body.

Things get increasingly strange and tense as the story unfolds and the reader races to find out what's really going on in Larry's head and behind his locked doors.

The languid state of some of the characters at times in the story contrasts sharply with the pace at which the tale unfolds, and the reader's own urge to turn the pages and find out what happens next.

The characters are all equally plausible, and the novel's oppresively hot setting provides the perfect backdrop to this steamy, claustrophobic tale. You feel like you are there with them, and that you'd rather be just about anywhere else.

Claustrophobic, intense thriller
I absolutely loved this book. The slowly building sense of menace is extraordinarily effective and that, combined with the oppressive dusty heat of the situation this couple find themselves in, make for a very intense and claustrophobic read. And when you think you've got to the climax of the book; you haven't. You know when you read one of those books that is so hypnotic you even forget about your own surroundings? This is one of those. Terrific.