Join us for the launch of Josephine Rowe’s Little World at Green Apple Books on 9th Ave, where Rowe will be in conversation with our very own Ashley Nelson Levy.
A dazzling novel about the mysterious body of a child saint and the lives it touches across time.
“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 lives the saint touches: 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 ending in contemporary Victoria.
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. She is the author of three story collections and two novels, including A Loving, Faithful Animal, longlisted for the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award and selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice. She has twice been named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist, and her collection Here Until August was shortlisted for the 2020 Stella Prize. Rowe has held fellowships from the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, among others. She currently lives in coastal Victoria.
Ashley Nelson Levy is the author of the novel Immediate Family, published by FSG (US) and Daunt Books (UK) in 2021. In 2015, she co-founded Transit Books, an independent publishing house with a focus on international literature. She lives in Northern California.