Book Club - Vikki Wakefield's To the River

Final Draft - Great Conversations

Vikki Wakefield is an author of fiction for young adults and adults. Her novel This Is How We Change the Ending was a Book of the Year in the 2020 CBCA Awards. Vikki’s new novel is To the River.

Twelve Years ago a fire in a remote town rocked the country, killing nine people. The Caravan Murders, as they came to be known, were never solved. The suspect, seventeen year old Sabine Kelly went on the run and has remained hidden.

To the authorities it was an open and shut case. Sabine and her family were bad news and it was only a matter of time before something happened; that a group of innocents and a police officer were killed made it a tragedy.

Journalist Rachel Weidermann investigated the case years ago to no avail. Sabine was a ghost and no one was talking. In a world saturated with true crime she couldn’t make the story work.

Now divorced and made redundant from her job, Rachel lives on the river, a long expanse of bush and perhaps just the perfect place to hide.

The first thing to say about To the River is that its setting is immaculate. Wakefield based the long expanse on sections of the Murray in South Australia. The novel’s eponymous river is a site of both beauty and danger and onto its shores we find Rachel and Sabine.

The novel’s narration alternates between the two women as the navigate lives that seem to be held in limbo. Rachel is struggling to redefine herself having lost her job and her marriage. Sabine has lived for twelve years as a fugitive and is now threatened with losing her last living relative, her pop Ray.

Whilst seemingly as different as they could possibly be, Rachel and Sabine are thrown together by circumstance. Sabine has lived too long on the run and needs someone to tell her story. Rachel wants this story but is unsure whether she is willing to follow it into the past and a truth she might never be able to verify.

To the River is pacy and thrilling with overlapping points of view promising quick cuts between the action. The story pits a race to find the truth against our modern sense of fake news. Rachel’s journey into Sabine’s life threatens to offer up more questions than answers and hovering over it all is the question; can she trust this woman who may have murdered her family.

At the heart of it all is a big question; who gets to be heard, who gets to be believed?

To the River is a tremendous page turner of a novel. The kind you’ll read in a weekend and then wish you’d taken it a little slower just so you had more to enjoy.