Katzen’s restless mind doesn’t settle for easy answers. She arrives in Australia after an ostensibly privileged South African childhood. Her parents divorce when Hayley is six. Her mother remarries, but the blended family is not a happy one. The death of her father when she is twenty-two catapults her to leave South Africa.

In Australia, she finishes a law degree and is headed towards an academic job. As a new lesbian, she enthusiastically embraces the subculture. But this is only a partial answer as to who she really is. There are still lonely nights.

Her mother and stepfather follow her, but the fissures in the family only grow deeper. She escapes Sydney to take up an academic job in northern New South Wales. She finds new friends who talk her familiar talk of books and ideas. She has a contract to write a legal textbook. But the real journey begins when she meets Jen.

Jen is eleven years older, country born and bred. Her sense of herself is strong. After teaching domestic science for a few years in the city, she threw it in and bought a marginal bush block. She built herself a basic house and has led an almost subsistence life for twenty years; it is a life she loves.

Despite or because of their total dissimilarities, the two women fall deeply in love. For some years they live separate lives, seeing each other every second weekend. The question is, can such different people make a life? Jen just accepts what is. Hayley questions and questions.

The book quickens when a bushfire sweeps through the area and Jen’s house is destroyed. Hayley helps her to rebuild, and during these trying times they move in together. The new house is an improvement, but the long-drop loo remains, as does the dusty two-hour drive to town, the lack of a single shop, and a social life limited to fortnightly piss-ups at the mud-brick hall where ‘men with long beards’ and a few forlorn women gather.

Will Hayley find a life there independent of her love for Jen? How many sacrifices do you make for love? Is there a niche for everyone, a ‘forever home’? Or are these things illusory when you are as deracinated as Katzen?

The next ten years are a seesaw of ups and downs. A flair for acting might be the way. Katzen writes and produces a play about asylum seekers. She volunteers for the fire brigade. She tries to help Jen as much as she can on the farm while beating herself up for not having Jen’s innate country skills. Eventually, she settles on writing stories and essays, part of writing degree. The work absorbs her and the monthly writing group is a lifeline. Yet she clings to her concept of herself as someone who needs the stimulus of city life. Often, she is just plain lonely.

Sometimes the reader gets impatient. Will this eternal self-doubt ever end, or will it destroy her – and the reader’s interest? But the empathy we feel for her keeps us reading – that and her deepening understanding of the community she lives in. There are many vivid portraits: There is Jack, Jen’s devoted sidekick at the farm. Jack has a gaggle of brothers, all unmarried, mostly illiterate, who speak an impenetrable dialect called ‘Fletcher-ese’ by locals. There’s Nessy, the eighty-something writer of bush poetry whom Katzen befriends, helping her to compile a last book before her death. And a neighbour, Terry, the self-builder whose dreamhouse in the bush takes so long that it destroys his marriage.

It is Jen who is the real spine of the book. She is grounded in the earth and has a wry wisdom expressed in a few well-chosen words. The great questions of life ping-pong between them, with Jen often providing an infuriating common-sense conclusion.

Katzen provides some lovely insights along the way: ‘Perhaps partnerships could be just as resilient as landscapes?’ and ‘Was my thinking – the expectations, resistance, beliefs and patterns – my prison rather than my life itself?’ Yet she returns to doubt and self-examination like an alcoholic to drink. This is where the book falters, forgetting that the reader has already got the point; rearticulating themes begins to irritate.

Katzen’s writing has many strengths. She has an excellent ear for dialogue and sensitive eyes for the small details of the bush. She is fearless in tackling difficult subjects. In strong and revealing prose, she arrives at a hard-won sense of self. Being an outsider is actually a gift to a writer. Once Katzen accepts that, she will be formidable.