About the book

An unscrupulous miner lies, cheats, and steals to survive in this rollicking adventure set in Western Australia. Alec Falls is a mining man, and on his honeymoon, he made the strike of his dreams: a long, beautiful seam of tin, just waiting to be ripped out of the ground. For two years, Falls and his wife lived high on the find, spending every penny they made, certain there would always be more. But one day the tin ran out, and so did Falls’s wife. Broke, alone, and ruined, he starts a fire and burns his house to the ground. As far as the world is concerned, Alec Falls is dead. He travels to the forbidding desert of Western Australia in search of the legendary abandoned gold mine known as Golden Soak. But the mine is empty, the land is dry, and the people of the desert feed on men like Falls. To make a second fortune, he must pull water from the sand—and gold from thin air. Inspired by Hammond Innes’s own extensive travels in Western Australia, Golden Soak is a classic story of adventure, daring, and greed at civilization’s edge.