Carte pentru toti. Vol 105. Dorinta

Mathinna is an Aboriginal girl from Van Diemen’s Land. Sir John Franklin adopts her, and she joins his home. The explorer and his wife, Lady Jane, want her to follow English ways. Franklin dies on a voyage to the Arctic. Rumours spread that his crew ate human flesh. Lady Jane asks Charles Dickens to defend his name. Dickens stages a play and acts the part of Franklin. He then falls in love with an actress aged eighteen. Mathinna, meanwhile, becomes a prostitute in her teens and dies.

Richard Flanagan’s novel draws on history to link these lives. Desire and colonial rule form the links between them. The book shows how desire can undo reason and change lives. It asks what sets those called civilised apart from those called barbaric.

The book opens with the violence of colonial rule in 1839. A preacher takes Aboriginal people who survived war to a remote island. He forces them to adopt English faith, food, clothes and homes. Their health grows worse, and many of them die. Yet he claims that their lives have improved. They long to hunt again and regain their old lives. This edition is volume 105 in the Carte pentru toti series.