Little World - by Josephine Rowe (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

"Little World holds tenderness, rage, faith and grace, and it does so in language--so precise, so exacting--it seems, at once, to cut through and join together the complexities of our relations. Each new work from Josephine Rowe is a revelation."--Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Little World opens with the body of a child saint stranded in the Australian desert. Her name is unknown, as is the story of her life and the status of her canonization. She arrives in a box made of canoe timber, and Orrin Bird is dressed in his best clothes to receive her.

As the novel sweeps across time and place, from the 1950s to the present day, we encounter the long shadow of the saint in many forms, revealed section by section: from the retired engineer who unwittingly becomes her custodian, to a woman driving across the Nullarbor Plain in the mid-1970s with a pair of young lovers and haunted by the forced adoption of her only child many years before, and ending in contemporary Victoria.

As we follow the lives the child saint touches across time, what is revealed is a haunting reflection on violence and the interdependency of all things. Little World is a dazzling feat by one of Australia's finest writers.

Review Quotes

Praise for Little World

"Little World holds tenderness, rage, faith and grace, and it does so in language--so precise, so exacting--it seems, at once, to cut through and join together the complexities of our relations. Each new work from Josephine Rowe is a revelation."--Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing

"A must-read...Josephine Rowe is a remarkable writer, able to capture entire lives in a few paragraphs, creating characters so immediately recognizable, so deeply knowable, that you feel like they're surely going on with their daily rituals, their heartbreaks and revelations, even after you've closed the book."--Literary Hub

"With Little World, Rowe has produced her best work yet. A fragmented but vivid narrative, sharpened by a jagged lyricism, Rowe's little world feels anything but. This book is an entire universe, unlike anything I've ever read before."--Jacob Rogers, Center for Fiction (Brooklyn, NY)

"A queer reliquary set adrift on unholy times."--Stephen Krause, Alienated Majesty Books (Austin, TX)

"Little World revolves around women's bodies, lovers, heartbreak, and a deceased young saint who touches them all. This is a swift punch of a novella gorgeously written."--Caitlin Luce Baker, Island Books (Seattle, WA)

"A beautiful day trip of a book that sparks marvel over the impenetrable yet quietly persistent mysteries of this world."--Meghan Collins, Lost City Books (Washington, D.C.)

"Little World is a masterful novel that far exceeds the bounds of its slim size. Josephine Rowe has worked magic here."--Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books (Point Reyes, CA)

"Traveling across time, place, and characters, Rowe tells a story of people encountering divinity and the resulting shifts with tenderness and grace."--Bennard Fajardo, Politics and Prose (Washington D.C.)

Praise for Josephine Rowe

"I found myself considering those rare things only books can do, feats outside the purview of film or fine art... Gorgeous."--Samantha Hunt, The New York Times Book Review

"Here Until August tracks the shimmer of precarious moments and transient moods with devastating precision. In their steady excavation of intimacy, these spacious stories bring Alice Munro to mind. I underlined sentence after sentence as I read: for their beauty, their clarity, and their wisdom. Josephine Rowe is a breathtakingly good writer, and this is a marvelous book."--Michelle de Kretser

About the Author

Josephine Rowe is the author of three story collections and two novels, including A Loving, Faithful Animal, longlisted for the 2017 Miles Franklin and selected as a New York Times Editors' Choice. She has twice been named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist, and her collection Here Until August was shortlisted for the 2020 Stella Prize. Rowe holds fellowships from the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, among others. She currently lives in coastal Victoria.