BELOMOR

A meditation on time, and loss: on how the most bitter recollections bring happiness, and the meaning of a secret rests in the thoughts surrounding it.

"Belomorkanal is a brand of strong, mood-altering cigarettes, and this book is best taken like such a cigarette, as a release from the chains of second-after-second time. It is a desert fable, and a testament to things seen; an Australian pilgrimage, and a flight through Europe's memoryshaded skies. It puts together the jigsaw pieces of our shattered world." - Nicolas Rothwell

Elegiac and seductive, BELOMOR is the frontier where truth and invention meet where fragments from distant lives intermingle, and cohere.

A man seeks out the father figure who shaped his picture of the past. A painter seeks redemption after the disasters of his years in northern Australia. A student of history travels into the depths of religion, the better to escape the demons in his mind. A filmmaker seeks out freedom and open space, and looks into the murk and sediment of herself. Four chapters: four journeys through life, separate, yet interwoven as the narrative unfolds. In this entrancing new book from one of Australia's most original writers, we meet European dissidents from the age of postwar communism, artists in remote Australia, snake hunters, opal miners and desert magic healers.

BELOMOR is a meditation on time, and loss: on how the most bitter recollections bring happiness, and the meaning of a secret rests in the thoughts surrounding it.

Nicolas Rothwell is the award-winning author of Heaven and Earth, Wings of the Kite-Hawk, Another Country, The Red Highway and Journeys to the Interior. He lives in Darwin, and is the Australian's roving northern correspondent.