Little World

Little World follows the decades-long journey of a girl's body that will not decompose, and is rumored to work miracles. The remains arrive in the Australian desert after the Second World War as a bequest from a guilt-stricken expatriate Norwegian to a solitary man named Orrin Bird, who becomes their reluctant custodian.

Moving backward and forward across the twentieth century, the novel traces the relic's earlier passage through a leprosy colony on the island of Nauru, where it served as a kind of protective charm for quarantined patients, before the disruptions of war carried it to Australia. From there Rowe follows the chain of people it touches: a retired engineer, a woman driving across the Nullarbor Plain in the 1970s with two young lovers in her car, and others down to the present day in contemporary Victoria.

Told in spare, allusive prose, Little World is less concerned with resolving the mystery of the body than with what it draws out of the people who come into contact with it — grief, guilt, tenderness, and a persistent, unresolved sense of the sacred in ordinary lives.