Set in the small, isolated town of Desperance on the Gulf of Carpentaria, Alexis Wright’s second novel conjures up a sweeping and poetic panorama of life in a town that seems a world away from modern civilisation. And yet all is not well here, with the indigenous population at loggerheads with the ineffective local government and its crassly philistine mayor. These tensions come to a head when a senseless murder leads to deaths in custody, and when an attack on a muchresented local mine leads to its cataclysmic destruction. Far from being simply a study of contemporary issues, Carpentaria touches, in an often poignant and satirical way, on themes of universal implication: the gulf between the haves and the have-nots and the government and the governed; and the clash between cold-blooded big business and the environment that it exploits – an environment that triumphs, mercilessly, in the end. Judith Loriente is from Readings Hawthorn