When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. Coleman doesn’t hurry in bringing these disparate characters together, but when it happens, a powerful myth comes to life before readers’ eyes.Ī delightfully duplicitous noodle-bender that flips the script on the Indigenous Australian survival narrative.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. But Coleman has an astonishing trick up her sleeve in a twist so subtle and shocking that it may not hit readers all at once but is likely to have a powerful emotional effect when it lands. It’s a cruel scene indeed, made more so by Coleman’s purposeful parallels to the evil treatment of native peoples during the British colonization of Australia in the 17th century.

By far the most interesting character is Johnny Star, a trooper who betrayed the colonizers and has accepted his fate as an outlaw traveling with a rough bunch of native comrades.

A government official charged with the protection of natives is so evil even his own wife calls him “Devil,” like the natives do. Esperance is a kind young woman who tries to protect her flock of starving refugees. Sister Bagra is a cruel headmistress at a mission for native children, abusing her livestock with malicious glee.

Jacky is an orphaned boy, now a slave on the run, trying to get home even as trooper Sgt. The title refers to an obscure legal principle used by Britain to justify the taking of Aboriginal territory-the term literally means “Nobody’s Land.” This harsh scene of brittle détente in the Australian Outback, set during an ambiguous point in the country's troubled history, is viewed through the eyes of several characters, all struggling in their own ways. It’s little wonder that Australian Aboriginal writer Coleman has been praised and nominated for awards in her own country for her thoughtfully woke debut novel about an invasion of Australia by punishing settlers and the subsequent resistance by a native people. Australian natives living under the oppressive brutality of forced colonization struggle to survive, let alone fight back.

Claire coleman terra nullius