Wonders of a Godless World by Andrew McGahan

On a torpid tropical island, in a decaying mental institution, there lives an orphan, a young woman who cannot speak, or understand the speech of others, or even remember her own name. Hers is a strange and isolated existence. Until, that is, a new patient arrives at her hospital--a mysterious foreigner who is lost in an inexplicable coma. Although he never wakes, the orphan becomes convinced that she can hear this foreigner speaking in her head. He is cursed, he claims, with immortality. And so begins a bizarre relationship between the two, a journey of discovery that will take them right around the world, and ultimately far beyond it.

But is any of this actually occurring? Or is it only madness? And why have the other inmates in the hospital begun to behave so oddly? As chaos threatens to consume them all, the orphan is gradually forced to question her very notions of self and power and sexuality and love, and finally to confront the true enigma of the foreigner's curse, and of his life never-ending.

Wonders of a Godless World, the new novel from Miles Franklin-winner Andrew McGahan, is a tumultuous tale of amazing happenings and archetypal conflicts. It is also a thought-provoking investigation into consciousness, a head-stretching story about the paradoxes of the mind, and a dramatic challenge to all the age-old assumptions about humanity's place in the world.