Remembering Babylon [Paperback]

A white-skinned boy stumbles out of the Australian bush speaking the language of the Aboriginal people who raised him. It's 1840s Queensland, and his arrival at a settler outpost unravels every fragile certainty the colonists have built. David Malouf turns this premise into something haunting and profound — a meditation on language, belonging, and the violence of drawing lines between "us" and "them." Gemmy is neither European nor Aboriginal now, suspended between worlds that won't claim him. The settlers' fear of what he represents — the permeability of civilization, the closeness of the wild — infects their community like a slow poison. Malouf writes with a poet's precision, every sentence luminous. This is historical fiction that asks uncomfortable questions about identity and empire without ever preaching. For readers who loved *The Secret River* or anyone drawn to novels where landscape itself becomes a character.