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Title: A Shared Dreaming
Review: Winner of the 2003 Miles Franklin Award, Miller's novel, set in far North Queensland, functions as a kind of metaphor of the tenuous relationship between black and white Australians. Childhood friends Bo Renney of the Jangga tribe and Melbourne academic Annabelle Beck, recently returned to her ancestral home after a marriage bust-up, forge a new relationship based on a realistic view of their shared history. Once having stared into the face of the violence between their two families in the past they are able to set their sites on a possible shared future. The narrative drags a little in the middle section but the latter half of the book is particularly moving as both of the protagonists make discoveries about their past that force them to rearrange their present. I was attracted to the cover because I have always felt a kind of connection of some sort to monoliths. My friend Gerard tells me it's part of my dreaming. Maybe so.
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