Bite-Sized Review: Tracks of the Heart by Heather Garside

“Three short stories of rural romance that will take you on journeys of heartbreak, terror and a woman's tentative struggles to reclaim her identity.

Playing With Fire 

Lisa is forced to revisit a tortured love affair when she recognises her companions on an outback train journey - an ill-fated family from her past.

Bushwhacked 

Brittany's quest for adventure on an isolated cattle station goes horribly wrong when she and Scott, the head stockman, are abducted on a lonely county road.

Coming Home 

Kirsty leaves a destructive marriage to return to her parent's cattle station, but has to contend with her father's new manager - the boyfriend she deserted years before in favour of the city.”

I read Heather’s debut novel, Breakway Creek (my review here) during 2013, so when she approached me to read and review this collection of three short stories, I was more than willing to do so.

Heather has a lot to offer in her writing – she has an easy and engaging writing style, brings her characters to life, her settings are beautifully rendered and, even though these are just shorts, there’s still enough of an emotional punch.

I certainly was left wanting more but with the Christmas period upon us, I’m sure there are many of you that won’t have time to sit down and get into a full-length novel. So, if you’d like to take a break, with a well-deserved coffee and a few slices of shortbread, then ideally these three little reads will satisfy your penchant for reading without taking up too much time.

I wish to thank Heather for providing me with an e-copy of this collection and look forward to reading her next full-length novel.

A Little About the Author

Heather Garside grew up on a cattle property of 47,000 acres in Central Queensland,  Australia.  As a child she loved horses, books and the bush although not a lot has changed except that she has grown to appreciate the finer things in life, like eating out.

While Heather is a member of the Romance Writers of Australia, she also belongs to the Central Highlands Writers' Group which have published three books of short stories, Boots At The Door, A Taste Of Fear and Pot Luck: Stories of the Central Highlands with several of her fiction and non-fiction stories and a couple of poems being included in these anthologies.

Heather published a historical romance set locally when she was in her early twenties and started another book but, having a family interrupted that flow and she didn’t seriously get back to writing until many years later and she finally sold an historical novel, The Cornstalk, to Wings ePress with the sequel, A Hidden Legacy, being purchased by them a few months later.

Her short story, Coming Home was selected for inclusion in one of the RWA's Little Gems anthologies and the same story and her poem, Drought, was printed in Idiom 23, the Bauhinia Literary Awards magazine.

Heather and her husband have two adult children and live on a smaller cattle and grain farm close to where she grew up.