Remembering Babylon

Winner of the IMPAC Award and Booker Prize nominee

In this rich and compelling novel, written in language of astonishing poise and resonance, one of Australia's greatest living writers gives and immensely powerful vision of human differences and eternal divisions.  In the mid-1840s a thirteen-year-old British cabin boy, Gemmy Fairley, is cast ashore in the far north of Australia and taken in by aborigines. Sixteen years later he moves back into the world of Europeans, among hopeful yet terrified settlers who are staking out their small patch of home in an alien place. To them, Gemmy stands as a different kind of challenge: he is a force that at once fascinates and repels. His own identity in this new world is as unsettling to him as the knowledge he brings to others of the savage, the aboriginal.

"Breathtaking...To read this remarkable book is to remember Babylon well, whether you think you've been there or not."
—The New York Times Book Review

In the mid-1840s, a 13-year-old British cabin boy is cast ashore in the far north of Australia and taken in by aborigines. Sixteen years later, he moves back into the world of Europeans. "Wonderfully wise and moving . . . a dazzling fable of human hope and imperfection."--The New York Times.

David Malouf's novel -- shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize -- is a masterpiece. In the mid-1840s, a thirteen year old boy 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 security in an alien, half-mythological land, hopeful yet terrified of what it might do to them.

Publishers Weekly

A shipwrecked British cabin boy is raised by Australian Aborigines in this novel shortlisted for the Booker Prize. (Oct.)

David Malouf was born in Brisbane in 1934. His last novel, The Great World, won the 1991 Commonwealth Writer's Prize, and the Prix Fémina Etranger. He lives in Sydney and Tuscany.