Lost voices
By: Christopher Koch
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Sydney, N.S.W
Language: eng
Number of pages: 465
ISBN-13: 9780732294632; 9780732296278
Subjects: Utopias; Fiction; Families
Description: Young Hugh Dixon believes he can save his father from ruin if he asks his estranged great-uncle Walter, a wealthy lawyer who lives alone in a Tasmanian farmhouse, for help. As he is drawn into Walter's rarefied world, Hugh discovers that both his uncle and the farmhouse are links to a notorious episode in the mid nineteenth century. Walter's father, Martin, was living in the house when it was raided by members of an outlaw community run by Lucas Wilson, a charismatic ex-soldier attempting to build a utopia. But like later societies with communitarian ideals, Nowhere Valley was controlled by the gun, with Wilson as benevolent dictator. Twenty-year-old Martin's sojourn in the Valley as Wilson's disciple has become an obsession with Walter Dixon: one which haunts his present and keeps the past tantalizingly close.