The Voices by Susan Elderkin

• Wellington City Libraries, New Zealand

In the remote, blood-red landscape of the Australian bush, thirteen-year-old Billy Saint hears the haunting song of an Aboriginal girl. The song tugs at something deep, something larger and more powerful than himself. She has sung Billy up - and he is destined to love her forever.

In an Alice Springs hospital ten years later, recovering from gruesome wounds of mysterious origin, Billy attempts to explain the voices in his head. But only Cecily, the Aboriginal nurse, will listen. What unravels is a mesmerising account of the relationship between a man, the land he loves, and the spirits of the country, struggling to be heard before it is too late.

The Voices is as seductively beautiful as the timeless landscape in which it is set. A lament for a disappearing culture, told with great delicacy and power, it will continue to haunt its readers long after the final page has turned.

Born in 1968, Susan Elderkin is a graduate of Cambridge University and of the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia, England. Her first novel, Sunset Over Chocolate Mountain, won a Betty Trask Award. She was selected as one of Granta's best young British novelists of the decade. She lives in London.