The Australian outback is a beautiful, bizarre and dangerous place – where lots of people go to get away from their lives or themselves, or to find themselves. Out of Breath by Anna Snoekstra is a cultish psychological thriller about naive foreign tourists who disappear in the outback.

Jo’s life in England turned upside down when she was very young – she was rejected by her mother and bought up by an ambivalent father. At twenty-seven she is looking for a place where she feels she belongs. She drops out of Art school and a toxic relationship in London and travels to Sydney, Australia to start afresh.When her relationship with Eric in Sydney fails as well and she needs to fulfill visa requirements and working remotely for a period, she heads to a mango farm in northwest Western Australia.

Things soon start to get creepy and weird – can you hear the foreboding music?

He holds his nose and she sees his mouth open, a huge breath, then he’s under. She sees the bobble of his bum, his feet splashing the surface. Then nothing. Silence. Jo finds she is holding her own breath. After a few seconds, she lets it out. Ho-jin doesn’t come up. She scans the water, looking at the heads, the people sitting on the sand bed. No one is moving.

I thought Snoekstra did a great job of capturing the beauty, isolation, eccentricity and slight creepiness of the outback. It’s not surprise that around 40 people lose their lives in it each year.

There were many moments in this novel where I cringed at the naivety and stupidity of the main character who either had no common sense about the perils of the Australian outback – or simply didn’t care enough about herself to worry about them. Either way I think Jo’s near death experience in the desert made the idyllic community she stumbled into seem or the more utopian…but I guess that’s the vibe cult leaders set out to create.

What do you do when you have joined an paradisal tight knit isolated community and discover it is not what it claims to be? You’ll have to read this psychological thriller to find out…