Remembering Babylon

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.