Carpentaria

The Gulf of Carpentaria in northern Australia — a place so remote it barely exists in the national imagination — and the Waanyi people who live there, whose relationship with the land, the sea, and the spirits predates the Australian state by thousands of years. Wright writes in a prose that incorporates Aboriginal oral storytelling — digressive, spiraling, the land as a living character — to dispatch from inside a world that white Australia has spent two centuries trying to erase. Won the Miles Franklin Award. The most formally radical Australian novel ever written and the most important. Almost nobody outside Australia has read it.