Wanting. Richard Flanagan. 2008.

Bass Strait, 1839. A young Aboriginal girl, Mathinna, runs through the wet wallaby grass of a wild island at the edge of the world to get help for her dying father. Eighteen years later in Manchester, the great novelist Charles Dickens is a sensation, starring in a play that more and more resembles the frozen landscape of his own inner life. 

The most celebrated explorer of the age, Sir John Franklin, and his wife, Lady Jane, adopt Mathinna as an experiment to prove that the savage can be civilised - only to discover that within the most civilised can lurk the most savage. When Sir John disappears in the Arctic while searching for the fabled Northwest Passage, Lady Jayne turns to Dickens for help. 

Wanting is a haunting meditation about love, loss and the way life is finally determined never by reason, but only ever by wanting.