Cool Ocean Water

Robert Danes wants more. In his late twenties, he has already enlarged the wealth to which his childhood accustomed him, but something is missing. Then, like a revelation, Robert is enraptured by Alice: a beautiful ingénue, their love flowers so strongly that it will bind them together in heartbreaking fate. The questions that follow threaten to break their family and friends; can they find the will to go on? Soulfully trusting, Alice’s language is the language of emotion, and to Robert she is the opposite of the calculation and ambition of his own life. To him, almost everything about Alice is new and true. After a beautifully intense courtship in Sydney, a shack on the Far South Coast, and Thredbo, Robert steels himself to propose marriage to Alice, and she accepts with all her usual glowing warmth. Robert’s parents host a magnificent engagement celebration at their harbourside mansion, a party which comes to be regarded as epochal by those who attend. Yet tragedy strikes, ravaging the families, and sending shockwaves through the Eastern Suburbs. Cool Ocean Water is a vivid, poetical story about the lives of the contemporary rich of Sydney, and is a record of the powerful in our time in one of the world’s emerging alpha cities.