Little World

The preserved body of a girl believed to be holy, her name and canonisation unknown, reaches the Kimberley in the 1950s packed in canoe wood. She has come from the Panama Canal Zone by way of Nauru, bequeathed by Kaspar Isaksen, who studied leprosy and used her tears to treat it, to his friend Orrin Bird, a retired engineer who is no Catholic but cannot turn a saint away. No one knows that she is aware, thinking over past and present. In the mid-1970s Matti Eberhart, sleepless and still grieving the child taken from her for adoption, comes upon the uncorrupted body, and drives across the Nullarbor with two young people in love. Decades later, as Covid reaches Victoria, the aged Matti lives in residential care, while the people around her try to understand what she leaves behind.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Set in

Australia, Panama, Nauru, 1950s–2020s

First published

2025

Author's age

41 when first published

ISBN

9781760645427 (Black Inc., Australia)

9798893380163 (Transit Books, United States)