Mitch’s life has been hell. His crops are failing and his sheep are hungry but he has decided that life is going to turn around and this is going to be his year.
First the rain comes then the love of his life, Neralie, returns home after 5 years in Sydney and it looks like he may get the year he envisaged. The only problem is the rain has come too early and may ruin his crop and he is now married; to the town’s nemesis.

The Year of the Farmer is a cleverly written satire, a dark tragicomedy, that will have you laughing out loud at the overly exaggerated characters all placed neatly in their respective boxes and performing perfectly on cue.

The small town is under threat from the drought and the water authority is doing everything it can to make life more difficult (on the pretense of helping them) for the farmers whilst making a little money on the side for themselves; that retirement fund. But the biggest threat will come from one of their own! A furious wife hell bent on fitting in but letting her hurt fuel her need for revenge.

I loved this story! There are a multitude of characters introduced one straight after the other which I found hard to sort out but as the story progresses everyone fits into their place.

The story brings to light the plight of the farmers and the devastating effect of the drought and the nonsensical stipulations and regulations set by the water authorities.
Ham shows the deep connection that the farmers have with their land and how they have intense feelings of letting their ancestors down when they lose their farm that has been handed down through the generations.

They were a town that stuck together when hearts were broken but even more so when their farms and livelihoods were at stake.
‘Then suddenly, in groups of two or three, the councillors, irrigators, riparians and townies left the pub and went, united, into the black star-speckled night, the smooth barrels of their loaded guns frosted silver by the moonlight’

I felt quite sorry for Mandy, Mitch’s wife, her only aim in life was to be someone, to fit in, but the whole town despised her and where Mitch’s moments of infidelity were encouraged hers were frowned upon. I’d be very interested to know what other readers thought of Mandy and her actions.
In today’s life where we expect everything, including our reads, to be fast paced and instantly gratifying this slow paced and slightly quirky novel may not appeal to everyone.

Content: for those that are sensitive to animal deaths; animals die in this story.
*I received a copy from the publisher to read and review ( )

Rosalie Ham’s fourth novel is very timely: The Year of the Farmer is set in a small rural town in the grip of drought. Its people are even more tightly tangled in the stranglehold of water politics.
Droughts are perennial in Australia, and there is constant tension about how best to use a limited supply of water. It’s not just farmers and environmentalists who bicker over who gets what, it’s also States upstream and downstream of rivers which straddle state boundaries. Some years ago the Federal Government got involved and designed a scheme to resolve these issues, but it’s state governments that implement it and everybody seems disgruntled with the result. The problem of water politics is only going to get worse as climate change wreaks havoc across our dry and dusty continent.
These big picture issues impact on the individual, of course, and Rosalie Ham’s hero Mitch is The Man on the Land. He’s a lovely man. Handsome, hard-working, kind and tender to old people and animals, he strides across his blighted landscape Doing His Best Against the Odds.
The Odds are stacked against him. His farm is failing, his ancient dad is not much use around the farm any more, the water authority is demanding efficiency improvements he can’t afford to make, and (via an apocryphal pregnancy that ended in ‘miscarriage’) he has found himself married to Mandy, the town’s Most Horrible Person. And when the story opens, his childhood sweetheart and the love of his life Neralie has come back from The Big Smoke to take over the local pub.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/10/15/the-year-of-the-farmer-by-rosalie-ham/ ( )

Another delight from Ham - she writes of small town communities and farmers that she know so well. ( )