Belomor

“Masterful and unforgettable.”—Pico Iyer

“Melancholy, singular, exhilarating, Belomor New edition reads like a haunted history of the world.”—Delia Falconer

“Belomor New edition resists easy categorisation. Its many characters are elusive, some more types than characters, more mouthpieces than fully rounded individuals. But this does not detract from this beautiful and mesmerising book, which engages the intellect as well as the emotions.”—Weekend Australian

Elegiac and seductive, Belomor New edition is the frontier where truth and invention meet—where fragments from distant lives intermingle, and cohere.

A man seeks out the father figure who shaped his picture of the past. A painter seeks redemption after the disasters of his years in northern Australia. A student of history travels into the depths of religion, the better to escape the demons in his mind. A filmmaker seeks out freedom and open space, and looks into the murk and sediment of herself.

Four chapters: four journeys through life, separate, yet interwoven as the narrative unfolds.

In this entrancing new book from one of Australia’s most original writers, we meet European dissidents from the age of postwar communism, artists in the outback, snake hunters, opal miners, and desert magic healers. Belomor New edition is a meditation on time and loss: on how the most bitter recollections bring happiness, and the meaning of a secret rests in the thoughts surrounding it.

Nicolas Rothwell is the award-winning author of Heaven and Earth, Wings of the Kite-Hawk, Another Country, The Red Highway, and Journeys to the Interior. He lives in Darwin, Northern Territory, and is the Australian newspaper’s roving northern correspondent.

Belomor was chosen as one of the Times Literary Supplements Best Books of 2013.