Cape Grimm by Carmel Bird

On the far northwest coast of Tasmania at Cape Grimm lies the isolated community of Skye, which practises a religion that reveres the imagination.

When Caleb Mean is born, his grandmother has a vision telling her he is the Chosen One. On Caleb's thirty-third birthday, he locks the whole community into the meeting hall and incinerates them. The only survivors are Caleb, his lover Virginia, and their baby daughter, Golden. How could such a thing happen? Do the answers lie in the history of Skye itself, founded by the unlikely survivors of a nineteenth-century shipwreck? Or do the only real clues lie in the dark truths of fairytales?

Cape Grimm is a chilling and bewitching novel about the terrible power of faith, which confirms Carmel Bird as one of our finest and most original writers.

Carmel Bird has been publishing fiction for three decades. Her previous novels include Red Shoes, shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 1998, The White Garden and The Bluebird Cafe. Carmel has also published several volumes of short stories and two guides to writing fiction: Dear Writer and Not Now, Jack - I'm Writing a Novel.