In the 1840s, a ship's boy, cast ashore in northern Australia, is taken in by Aborigines. Sixteen years later he steps out of the bush and inadvertently confronts the new white settlers with their unspoken terrors. A searing and magnificent picture of Australia at the time of its foundation, focusing on the hostility between early British settlers and native Aboriginals, Remembering Bablyon tells the tragic and compelling story of a boy caught between both worlds – the civilised and the primitive. Shot through with humour, and written with the poetic intensity that characterised Malouf's An Imaginary Life, this is a novel of epic scope yet it is simple, compassionate and universal: a classic.