In England in the spring of 1939, Clancy, an Australian nurse, waits with her infant daughter for news of her lover, who was a volunteer with the Mackenzie-Papineau Brigade in the Spanish Civil War.

As she waits, Clancy shares with her daughter the story of her own childhood in the Australian bush and her disastrous marriage to an English archaeologist. When the Spanish Civil War erupted, Clancy volunteered on the Republican side. Her chance for happiness amid the chaos came when she met the young Canadian, Douglas Ross. She has not heard from him since the final desperate offensive.

The fourth work of fiction by the award-winning Australian-Canadian writer Gayla Reid, Come from Afar is a sweeping historical story of personal and political struggle.

Gayla Reid was born in Armidale, New South Wales, Australia, in 1945. A Vancouver resident, she works in public legal education. Her story "In the Water, Like This" won the fiction prize in the CBC/Saturday Night Canadian Literary Awards in 1994 and was published in Saturday Night (May, 1994). Another story, "Sister Doyle's Men," won the 1993 Journey Prize. Both stories are included in her collection To Be There with You (1994).

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“Reid brings to the page the passion of Clancy’s times, blending the horrors of war with a kind of lyrical beauty … the Spanish Civil War setting is fascinating and complex.”

Quill and Quire

“The fragmented, non-linear structure of the book … one of Reid’s strengths. It comes to productively represent the fragmented nature of war, Cox’s conflicted relationships and state of mind, and, most powerfully, the way that her daughter struggles to narrate and fill in the blanks of her mother’s story.”

Canadian Literature

“Elegantly written and memorably stored away in my mind. I will count the days until her next novel.”

The Sun-Times