Little World

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2026 MILES FRANKLIN PRIZE

A dazzling novel about the mysterious body of a child saint and the lives it touches across time.

He has no notion of how to care for a saint. Even a small one. Does not even believe . . . Still. Catholic or not. You don’t turn away a saint.

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 canonisation. 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.

'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 is] the kind of concise, precisely sketched novel that you can read in one sitting, coming away with a sense of having been briefly but profoundly transported... [an] elevating, spiritual dance in language.' The Washington Post

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