In the very-scarily-too-near future, entire nations are lost to ice melt and subsequent rising sea levels. Amid this environmental catastrophe a privatised system of detaining the now-stateless environmental refugees has arisen, and those with no country to call home are held in detention centres dotted around the world. The refugees are forced to work to earn their right to become citizens of their captors' lands. Within this book we see themes of climate change, privatised essential services, monopoly control of resources, and the monetisation and dehumanisation governments will force upon their citizens in the name of shareholder interests. This story is told through transcripts from a court case and the internal accounts of two young people, virtual strangers coming together surrounded by chaos This could possibly be the most important book of our times, a tool to expose the money-making processes that are being constructed right before our eyes. A great book by a great award winning author.

Rohan Wilson (featured here in Meet an Aussie Author) is one of my favourite authors. From his debut novel The Roving Party (which won the Vogel and a swag of other prizes) to his second, the award-winning To Name Those Lost, he is an author whose books offer a forensic insight into human brutality. But while both Wilson's previous books were set in colonial Tasmania, his new novel, Daughter of Bad Times is set in the future. It is a foreseeable future which is uncannily like our own times.

The 'daughter of bad times' is the obscenely wealthy Rin Braden, whose adoptive mother Alessandra is the billionaire head honcho of a corrections company. Cabey-Yasuda Corrections a.k.a. CYC has made its money by repurposing climate change refugees, and the Australian government is only too happy to be complicit in a facility called Eaglehawk in Tasmania, where stateless people who survived the sinking of the Maldives as the ocean rose, are lured to factory work in abominable conditions on the promise of a visa at the end of it. The canny economics of this arrangement mean that these non-citizen detainees have to pay for everything they use, from their relocation expenses to toilet paper to their daily meal, all from an inadequate salary. This makes it impossible ever to pay off their debt but still they go without all but the bare necessities because to do otherwise would be to lose all hope. Those Muslims who have not lost their faith after a man-made catastrophe which has left them with nothing—not even their families—perform their daily prayers on bits of cardboard salvaged from the factory.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/05/26/daughter-of-bad-times-by-rohan-wilson/ ( )