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Lonely in Longreach by Eva Scott: book review

 



 

Lonely in Longreach (2020) is set in a remote town in rural Queensland in Australia. 

 

Sam Costello’s wife died in 2012. It is now 2019 and Sam is managing the farm with his 15-year-old son Levi and their dog Kevin. Levi feels guilty about his plans to go to university in Sydney, and to follow his best friend, a girl called Maddie McRae. 

 

Levi and Maddie decide it’s time for Sam to begin a new relationship, but there are no eligible women in Longreach. In secret, they concoct a profile for an online dating site – Lonely in Longreach. Sam has not been on a date with another woman for 16 years, three months, and eleven days!

 

Journalist Sarah Lewis lives in Sydney with her flatmate and best friend Fiona. When 35-year-old Sarah visits her parents and younger brother Hayden, her boyfriend Greg announces that one day he intends to marry her. Her parents are not happy with ‘one day’ because they want it to ‘now’. Fiona thinks it’s time that Sarah joins a dating site to find someone without commitment issues, especially since Sarah is writing an article about love in the outback – outback in drought-affected rural Australia – for the magazine she works for: Seriously Sydney. She calls her profile Solitary in Sydney. 

 

Like the 1993 movie Sleepless in Seattle, the distance between Sydney and Longreach is 1,300 kilometres (830 miles). Predictably, Solitary in Sydney writes to Lonely in Longreach and the two teenagers sift through the responses to find the right one for Levi’s father. 

 

Levi and Maddie hatch a plan to get Sarah to Longreach, but Sam has no idea, not a clue, about their matchmaking intentions. The story gets more interesting from this point, halfway into the novel.  

 

This is light romantic novel that explores the growing relationship not only between Sam and Sarah until deceptions are discovered, but also between childhood friends Levi and Maddie, and between father and son. It’s about friendships, expectations and hope. 

 

However, I have been to Longreach for work and the remote Queensland city has more to offer than the author mentions in this novel, and only in terms of quick, touristy visits. So, there’s more than loneliness in Longreach.

 

 

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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