Memories of a Brainless Girl

The novel is a multi-level Aussie noir tapestry, weaving together three strands: a biological miracle, a portrait of dangerous institutional corruption, and a brutal murder mystery in a moody, shadowed landscape. The setting of the story is a small town in 1980 rural Queensland—a region pejoratively known as Australia’s “Deep North”. It is a time of corruption in high and low places, and an era of fierce ideological battles between progressive and conservative forces. At the heart of the narrative is nineteen-year-old Natalie, a young woman who lives with a catastrophic brain condition with only 10% of a normal brain—a true-life condition brought to the world in 1980 by Professor John Lorber from England. Yet, as with some of Professor Lorber’s cases, Natalie lives a normal life.