Richard Flanagan

Set in northern Australia before World War II, an English aristocrat who inherits a sprawling ranch reluctantly pacts with a stock-man in order to protect her new property from a takeover plot. As the pair drive 2,000 head of cattle over unforgiving landscape, they experience the bombing of Darwin by Japanese forces firsthand.

Tasmania, 1954: Slovenian migrant Melita abandons her husband and young daughter, Sonja. Sonja's distraught father perseveres with his new life in a new country, but he is soon crushed into an alcoholic despair, and Sonja herself abandons him at the earliest opportunity. Now, nearly 20 years later, a single and pregnant Sonja returns to Tasmania's highlands and to her father in an attempt to put the pieces of her life back together.

The story of an English aristocrat, Lady Sarah Ashley, who inherits a large cattle ranch in Australia after her husband dies. When Australian cattle barons plot to take her land, she joins forces with a cattle drover to protect her ranch.

Dorrigo Evans, an Australian surgeon on the Burma Railway during WWII, is haunted by his time as a POW, as well as a forbidden affair he had with his uncle's wife prior to the war.