What The Ranges Keep: Emotional Second Chance Outback Romance

What the Ranges Keep is a deeply emotional, beautifully written Australian romance set against the ancient, breathtaking landscape of the South Australian Flinders Ranges. When Adelaide-based photographer Ellie Marsh accepts a commission to photograph the remote Outback country north of Hawker, she arrives expecting to produce good work and leave. What she finds instead is a landscape that reaches into her at something cellular, and a man who is so completely of his place that photographing one without the other is impossible.

Lachlan Holt has run Yarraponga Station for twelve thousand acres of Flinders Ranges country for his entire life, a man built from the ancient red quartzite and the patience of a person who has been watching the same gorge for thirty years and is still revising what he knows. Their love story begins in a gorge with ochre markings forty-five thousand years old and builds through courtship and marriage into a life that is extraordinary and genuinely good, until it isn't quite enough, and both of them must face the painful truth that two people can love each other completely and still grow in different directions.
What follows is the most honest part of the story: the separation that is nobody's fault and everybody's grief, the child who becomes the bridge neither parent asked her to be, and the long, hard, beautiful road back to each other, not to the life they had before, but to a better, truer version built from the full understanding of what they nearly lost. Spanning twelve years of love and loss and return, What the Ranges Keep is a novel about the courage it takes to leave the right thing and the greater courage it takes to come back to it, and about a landscape so ancient and so patient it will be there for both.