Tourmaline is an isolated Western Australian mining town - a place of heat and dust, as allegorical as it is real.

Out of the desert staggers a young diviner, Michael Random, offering salvation to this parched town. The once comatose community is indeed stirred to life, by hate as much as by love, and its people find salvation neither in water nor gold.

'With its richly textured sense of place, and its story hovering like a desert mirage between the real and the surreal, Tourmaline is Stow's most profound meditation on the confused spiritual heritage of Europeans living in Australia. Tourmaline is the ship of the Australian soul, isolated in an inland desert, and Stow has explored it with a visionary intensity more common in the Russian than in the Australian or the English novel But the spare, arid, harsh and yet living desert is unmistakably Australian, and the narrative it contains compels by its very strangeness and the stark truth of its insight.' - Anthony J. Hasasll

'Stow's is an intense and extraordinary talent.' - Spectator