Featured

For fans of Wimmera and Jasper Jones, The Jump is one for you!

In the Australian outback, Seventeen-year-old Jamie and his best friend Melissa spend their days on the cattle station and swimming the gorge. A chilled, care free life, that is until the day “Irish” turns up! While Jamie, Melissa and Irish build up a friendship despite their age gap, things turn upside down when Irish goes missing!

A great story about the consequences of how things can spiral out of control when you keep things to yourself and don’t know what to do with it or who to turn to. How guilt plays on your mind and how you process that guilt. Is it enough to make you come clean? Or can you stick your head in the sand and forget? Jamie faces this dilemma in The Jump and I was with him on his journey. I could relate to being torn between telling and not telling and not knowing what the consequences of either decision would be.

The outback setting was described perfectly and I had images of the picturesque gorge and the cattle muster scenarios so vividly in my mind!

It wasn’t how I expected it to end but I was so pleased with the fabulous ending that really topped off this book! – Mandy Stebbing – via Goodreads

Englishman Jimmy Ward has never been to a cattle station or Australia for the matter…

I loved the writing style Ghis has and I’ve never been to a cattle station or Australia for the matter let alone the outback. The descriptive writing emerges the reader to such an extent it’s as if your right there at Jamie’s side.

Some characters you immediately like and others you just know you’re not going to like at all. For me it was Melissa, she starts out ok but turns in to a right bitch!!

Jamie and Melissa are best friends and meet a random backpacker, Irish. They all get along but then things tun bad….fast! Being youthful they don’t have life experience and make some very poor decisions. Will these decisions rip apart the life they know? Will the dust settle or will life change forever?

Jamie battles with right and wrong and has no one to turn to, the only person he would talk to is dead so he can’t seek her advice. He’s afraid of getting things wrong and letting his father down.

School holds no place for Jamie, he plans to follow his father and run Kelian but the decisions he made at the start of the summer have comeback to taunt Jamie!!

This is an outstanding debut novel, it gripping, suspenseful, well written, descriptive and immersive, it takes the reader to the heart of the outback, to the heart of Kelian cattle station where Jamie lives for the annual muster.

‘The heart-warming thrill of this story didn’t disappoint’ – Mandy Mauloni

A compelling read – eerily accurate in capturing the psyche of a teenage boy, visions of the remote Australian Outback, and the emotion of a carefree life so quickly taken away. I really enjoyed the author’s beautiful descriptive prose.

I became so invested in the protagonist; I was desperate to know how his journey ended … the heart-warming thrill of this story didn’t disappoint.

Mandy Mauloni, Gold Coast

PRESS RELEASE

Moral dilemma creates suspenseful, coming-of-age story.

Queensland author Ghis Gallo’s innate knowledge of outback Queensland and life on a cattle station provides the redolent backdrop to a suspenseful drama in her debut, coming of age novel, The JUMP released in April 2022.

For 17-year-olds Jamie and Melissa, growing up in a small outback community is the epitome of a simple life that revolves around friendships, fishing, and the annual cattle muster.  That is until one fateful day, when the teenagers, witnessing the horrific death of a backpacker, dive headfirst into a moral dilemma interlaced with guilt, fear, and conflicting agendas.

According to Ms Gallo, The JUMP springs from a strong sense of place and the intrinsic familiarity of time spent camping, exploring, and seeking adventure on some of northern Queensland’s most remote cattle stations.  

“The book is set in a landscape and lifestyle that I know intimately, which from first appearances may seem romantic, but have their own fair share of ‘warts and all’.  It is a setting that inspired what I believe is a page turning story full of dramatic twists and turns and an inconvenient truth.

For characters Melissa and Jamie, their once carefree existence is destroyed simply through being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it is how they and others respond that keeps readers searching for answers and enthralled to the very end, Ms Gallo said.

  • Author: Ghis Gallo, 2022
  • Title of the work: The Jump
  • Publisher/distribution: Nightstand Press
  • Release Date: 6 April 2022
  • ISBN Number: 978-0-6452762-6-8
  • Number of Pages: 236
  • Format: eBook & Paperback