A crazed young man crashes through a tropical forest in northern Australia. An elderly history professor in England awaits arrest for writing her memoir. What links their destinies?
Seventy-year old Professor Susan Bridehead is writing an illicit memoir. She's risking a charge of sedition and a death sentence in a society where handwriting and paper are banned. Her day job is at the Oxford campus of The University of Sydney, where she is writing the History of the Principality of Australia: The First Century. The work has been commissioned by Princess Maureen Macfarlane, whose commoner ancestors excised Australia's landmass from itself a century ago, and leased it to the international community as a uranium supplier and nuclear fuel storage facility. Susan's writing is monitored and censored by The Universe, the Palace's worldwide information management monopoly.
The Principality of Australia is the world's first virtual state, with its leased HQ in Oxford's Bodleian Library. The Macfarlane dynasty has a stranglehold on the world's economy through the triopoly of consulting companies Sluzhba, Sino-French and Caremundo. Indebted national governments around the world outsource their legislative, executive and judicial functions to the Macfarlanes.
The continent of Australia is now known as Patria Nullius?nobody's homeland. Environmentally ruined and mostly depopulated, the landmass is controlled by Australian Border Security Inc and swathed in official secrecy. But Patria Nullius has a hidden population of survivors living in autonomous settlements beyond the reach of government.
Susan has her own secret; she was born in Patria Nullius, where she had a brief and tragic marriage to Jude, a young mystic who believed his destiny was determined by a bizarre prophecy based on a nineteenth century novel. Her illicit memoir tells of her life in a village in the far north of Australia ruled by a strict patriarchy , and her life with Jude, a fugitive from a matriarchal settlement in the south.
In failing health and tired of writing fawning hagiographies for the Palace, Susan races to write the story of her life in Patria Nullius. She is aided by Lochinvar Quoit, a self-serving Palace functionary who forces her into a deadly bargain. Will she complete her story before her arrest?
'The author writes with a spare beauty. The characters were intriguing, the structure of the book just right for the telling of this fascinating story. Highly recommend it.' (Amazon UK 5-star review)
