"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."

Alexis Wright Tag

Alexis Wright's Carpentaria, an epic work set in a fictional town called Desperance, opens before there are any people in it at all: an ancestral serpent, "a creature larger than storm clouds," descends from the stars and drags itself across the wet clay of the...