Tasmania's foremost living novelist set this 1997 novel in a Tasmanian hydro-electric construction camp in the 1950s, where the daughter of a Slovenian immigrant labourer searches for understanding of her mother's suicide. The novel won the Australian Booksellers' Book of the Year and made Flanagan's reputation; it is also one of the most honest portraits of post-war Tasmanian working-class life, the isolation of the wilderness camps, and the silent damage carried by displaced European migrants.
Flanagan was born in Longford and lives near Hobart, and his fiction (including the Booker-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Gould's Book of Fish) keeps returning to Tasmania's strange and violent history. This is the most accessible place to start.