The Unearthed

There are animals in the camouflage of undergrowth; they forage this final, fading night hour. They hear the grunting men and lift their heads, listen, then bound away: the scrub, the bushes shake and wave, signalling their invisible trajectories.

After decades-old human bones are discovered in the Tasmanian wilderness, Antonia Kovcs returns home with questions for her father, a retired police inspector in Queenstown.

Meanwhile, Tom Pilar receives news of an inheritance, from a man he barely remembers, one of his father's friends from the early days, newly arrived in the island and looking for work.

Set amidst the harsh terrain of the timber and ore industries of the west coast, The Unearthed is a haunting novel about the past and its quiet but tenacious grip on the present. It reveals the tragic connections between the disparate lives of post-war migrants and local workers, and the fallibility of memory, the illusion of truths and the repercussions on real lives.