Rachel Mears – a promising young athlete – has her life turned upside down when a drunken driver knocks her off her bicycle, rendering her a paraplegic. She faces a fragile, long journey on her way back to wholeness. (NOTE: No sex, but there is a brief discussion about intimate marital relations.)
As the owner of a flourishing construction business, Roy Burke had little time to look for a wife. So his secretary and mother decided to take matters into their own hands. No-one foresaw the chaos that would ensue.
This tale is based on a time in 1969, when I hitch-hiked from Sydney to Perth, some 2,500 miles (4,000+ km). This, in the middle of a very hot Australian summer. The main road, a lot of it unsealed at that time, runs across the Nullarbor Plain, a desolate land inhabited mainly by kangaroos, with a few small settlements along the way. I must have been mad, but I did actually complete the journey, taking only 3-and-a-half days. The latter part of the story is fiction, but the majority was true.