Little World

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRIZE

“Affecting, sensual, otherworldly... [Little World] tenderly explores what small things can make a life sacred.”—The New York Times

“Little World holds tenderness, rage, faith and grace, and it does so in language—so precise, so exacting—it seems, at once, to cut through and join together the complexities of our relations. Each new work from Josephine Rowe is a revelation.”—Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Little World opens with the body of a child saint stranded in the Australian desert. Her name is unknown, as is the story of her life and the status of her canonization. She arrives in a box made of canoe timber, and Orrin Bird is dressed in his best clothes to receive her.

As the novel sweeps across time and place, from the 1950s to the present day, we encounter the long shadow of the saint in many forms, revealed section by section: from the retired engineer who unwittingly becomes her custodian, to a woman driving across the Nullarbor Plain in the mid-1970s with a pair of young lovers and haunted by the forced adoption of her only child many years before, and ending in contemporary Victoria.

As we follow the lives the child saint touches across time, what is revealed is a haunting reflection on violence and the interdependency of all things. Little World is a dazzling feat by one of Australia’s finest writers.

Josephine Rowe was born in 1984 in Rockhampton, Australia, and grew up in Melbourne. In the United States, her writing has appeared in Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Iowa Review, The Paris Review Daily, The Common and Freeman’s.She holds fellowships from the Wallace Stegner program in fiction at Stanford University, the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, the Omi International Arts Center, and Yaddo. She was the winner of Australia’s Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize in 2016 and has been named one of The Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelists. Her debut novel, A Loving, Faithful Animal was long–listed for the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award and selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice.