Publisher's Synopsis
Award-winning Aboriginal author Miki Mitayn traverses the zone between brutal reality and transcendental wisdom in this astonishingly original novel. Mari speaks languages in her sleep all night.
So, Dr. Nerida Green plays a recording of her wife's 'sleep talk' to her friend, a linguistics professor she used to smoke bongs with. He asks where Mari learned to pronounce Ancient Siamese and archaic Gaelic. Then stops responding to Nerida's texts and calls.
Nerida & Mari live in an extreme, unique environment at a remote Aboriginal community in the Central Australian desert. It suits them.
Dr Nerida, a former political activist, is an urban Aboriginal lesbian married to Mari, a rural German of Roma and Jewish descent. They care for Aboriginal people living on the front line of dispossession, where the government has banned alcohol and porn. And sequestered people's money in a harsh social experiment that covers for a land grab.
Will the women be arrested for their lesbian books? For cherry schnapps in the Black Forest cake?
In this volatile situation, listening to spirits channelled by her wife messes with Nerida's head.
She is fascinated and horrified by Aedgar, the spirit Mari channels.
He incarnated as a gay man five hundred years ago, when people could be tortured to death for it. Before that he says he helped create the Earth.
Before long Mari, frustrated by the New Age ideas apparently coming out of her mouth when she's not around, is furious. And ready to fight as soon as the enemy makes himself clearer. She is not aware of what is said when she is in trance and doesn't want to know, but has to live with the consequences.
As Aedgar reveals more of his insights and powers, Nerida's reality changes.
When he foretells a tragedy involving mass deaths that she must not try to prevent, she has to question her role in bringing his dark knowledge to the world.
