After 16 years spent living with aborigines, a young man rejoins European society, in David Malouf’s intense vision of humankind’s eternal divisions.
In the mid-1840s, a 13-year-old boy, Gemmy Fairley, is cast ashore in the far north of Australia and taken in by aborigines. Sixteen years later, when settlers reach the area, he moves back into the world of Europeans, men and women who are staking out their small patch of home in an alien place, hopeful and yet terrified of what it might do to them. The boy’s otherness both fascinates and repels them, just as his own identity is unsettled by this strange new world.
David Malouf
About the Author
David Malouf was brought up in Brisbane, and is an internationally acclaimed and multi award-winning author.