'The curse of this haunting book is that you read it too fast.' New Yorker Fred Scully waits at the arrival gate of an international airport, anxious to see his wife and seven-year-old daughter. After two years in Europe they are finally settling down. He sees a new life before them, a stable outlook again, a fresh start, a cottage in the Irish countryside that he's renovated by hand. He's waited, sweated on this reunion. He does not like to be alone – he's that kind of man. The flight lands, the glass doors hiss open, and Scully's life begins to go down in flames. So begins an odyssey across Europe, a journey through the underworld of every lover's nightmare, as father and daughter, isolated from each other by terror and need, desperately search the wreckage of their lives for answers. 'Winton has forced a different kind of thinking about men and their imperatives, about the value and meaning of action … The Riders is a grand, poised, metaphorical reconciliation, a work which manages the move forward.' Sydney Morning Herald 'The fact that Winton is able to charge this painful progress of self-discovery with the energy of a quarter-mile dash gives his novel its breathless grace.' London Sunday Times