The Cameleer's Last Run

About this book:

The railway's iron scream shatters forty years of silence across the gibber plains, and with it comes the death knell of the cameleers. Noor Mohammad—weathered, stubborn, and fluent in the language of sand and thirst—watches the first locomotive crawl north toward Alice Springs, knowing the contracts are cancelled, the camps being cleared, and the camels slated for the rifle. But Noor has one debt the ledgers don't record: a promise made twenty years ago to a dying man in the Simpson Desert, and a set of bones waiting for a stone and a prayer in the tongue of the Hindu Kush.

With Rustam, his ancient bull camel who remembers every hand that fed him and every river that nearly drowned them, Noor turns his back on the steel ribbon and strikes east into the *Loot*—the red emptiness where dunes walk, wells lie poisoned, and no lorry's rubber tires can follow. Pursued by the indifference of progress and the geometry of surveyors, he carries only a brass compass, a slate map scratched with an iron nail, and the weight of a vow that the railway men, with all their engineering, cannot comprehend.

*The Cameleer's Last Run* is a masterwork of historical fiction that renders the Australian interior as a character unto itself—merciless, beautiful, and indifferent to the men who try to draw lines across it. In prose that smells of saltbush, woodsmoke, and camel sweat, it tells the story of a vanishing world and the stubborn few who refuse to let it vanish without witness. For readers of Cormac McCarthy, Peter Carey, and Kim Scott, this is a novel about what endures when the tracks run out: honor, memory, and the steady, three-mile-an-hour pace of a promise kept.