The Book of Science and Antiquities

About this book

By the Booker Prize-winning author of Schindler's Ark, a bold, millennia-spanning novel about community, mortality, and what it means to be human.In a novel of breathtaking reach and inspired imagination, one of Australia's greatest writers tells the stories of two men who have much in common. What separates them is 42,000 years.Shade lives with his second wife amid their clan on the shores of a bountiful lake. A peaceable man, he knows that when danger threatens, the Hero ancestors will call on him to kill, or sacrifice himself, to save his people.Over 40,000 years later, Shade's remains are unearthed near the now dry Lake Learned in New South Wales. The sensational discovery fascinates Shelby Apple, a documentary film maker who tracks the controversies it provokes about who the continent's first inhabitants were and where Shade's bones belong.To Shelby, who will follow his own heroes to the battlefields of Eritrea and the Rift Valley where Homo Sapiens originated, Shade is a messenger from an ancient culture that lived in harmony with the land. And when mortality looms, he becomes a symbol of enduring life.