Obsessed with unravelling the mystery of his brother’s death, JASON WILSON, a successful Derivatives Trader, is stuck in the middle of an eerie wilderness with his brother’s widow, FIONA, and their reticent guide, ELLEN. He wants to know what happened to his brother, why dependable SAM quit his job, left his wife, shacked up with a hippy girl he met on the bus, and died three months later. Three months after he passed through the Gate.

No one really knows what the Gate is. Some say it’s a portal to another dimension; others, that only the enlightened pass through. But the Gate is not what is seems, and each of the seekers – Sam, his lover RHIANNA, Jason, and Sam’s wife Fiona – will face their innermost limitations, fears, and longings.

Abandoning the structures and props of their every day lives, and confined in the crucible that the wilderness trek provides, the two couples are forced together. As they get closer to the Gate they begin to divest themselves of the assumptions and safety mechanisms that had supported them in their lives up until now.

As the story of Sam’s fateful journey to the Gate unravels, and with piecing together the sequence of events that culminate in Jason’s own journey to the gateway, Jason confronts a fundamental unhappiness in his life, and he rediscovers his dreams and suppressed passions.

The Gate is an edgy contemporary spiritual journey, following the story of two brothers and their respective climbs to a mystical gateway, eighteen months apart. The novel explores the relationship between perception and reality, fate and free will, self-responsibility and lack of integrity, searching and knowing.

Status: First Draft
50,000 words. Undergoing restructuring and re-writing.

The Gate has been awarded a NSW Litlink residency at Varuna Writer's Centre for July 2008.

Sample Chapter

To read a sample chapter from The Gate, please click on the first chapter below.