In southern Australia, a landscape scarred by division, a group of childhood friends seeks individual destinies.
There are the women: Jane, passionately committed to her art; Wendy, in search of fun; Elspeth, the heiress seeking enlightenment; and Josie, dedicated to doing good. Then there are the men: Alex, ambitious but melancholy; Ziggy, the brilliant actor; Rene, the ideologue; Cleve, snatched by the state from his Aboriginal parents; and Danny, who has spent more of his life in custody than free.
These are the custodians, but of what, and for whom? From the outback tot he heights of Manhattan's art world and the London stage, from tropical Queensland to Mao's China, the friends are finally reunited in their contested country, where they struggle to find a new accommodation - with each other and with their home.
Such is the scope of 'The Custodians' that it is at once a startling and often comic novel about friendship, love and betrayal and an astonishing story of struggle and history - a history which the characters must both embrace and transcend if they are to find reconciliation with the land to which they belong, but which does not belong to them.
