Coming Rain

Western Australia, the wheatbelt. Lew McLeod has been travelling and working with Painter Hayes since he was a boy. Shearing, charcoal burning, whatever comes. Painter made him his first pair of shoes. It's a hard and uncertain life but it's the only one he knows.


But Lew's a grown man now. And with this latest job, shearing for John Drysdale and his daughter Clara, everything will change.


Stephen Daisley writes in lucid, rippling prose of how things work, and why; of the profound satisfaction in hard work done with care, of love and friendship and the damage that both contain.


Stephen Daisley was born in 1955 and grew up in the North Island of New Zealand. He has worked on sheep and cattle stations, on oil and gas construction sites and as a truck driver, among many other jobs. Stephen's first novel, Traitor, won the 2011 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction. He lives in Western Australia with his wife and five children.


‘The minutiae of the woolshed and animal behaviour are brought to life with skill and affection.’ Readings


‘[Daisley’s] evocative prose nails the rural zeitgeist and the mystery of mateship.’

Qantas The Australian Way


‘This is a challenging and brave book…[Daisley] writes with a maturity and insight wrought of experience. His writing is at once cruel and gentle, graphically violent, including to animals, yet tender and beautiful.’ Sunday Star Times


‘Coming Rain shimmers with dusty red heat…Tune in to the distinctive rhythm of the prose and you’ll enjoy the rich, subtle rewards of a really good book.’ New Zealand Listener



‘In Coming Rain this late beginner continues to make his distinguished, solitary way, not least in reclaiming the rural societies of a half century ago, rendered so vividly that they seem keenly of the present, rather than past curiosities.’ Australian



‘Some of [Daisley’s] most vivid writing. Here the minutiae of farm life are rendered with respect and sympathy…Moving and brilliant.’ Australian Book Review



‘Powerful masculine prose, brutal truths and unflinching truthfulness make this a novel that is as unsettling as it is evocative.’ New Zealand Herald


‘Stephen Daisley has absorbed the Western Australian landscape and describes it evocatively…[His] writing style reminds me of Henry Lawson’s. Its short, sharp sentences and chapters, raw language and dialogue define the characters and the Outback in a grimly realistic but deeply humane way.’ Good Reading