"Janette Turner Hospital's fine new novel concerns a place, called Outer Maroo, which is literally off the map; so far out in the back of the Australian Outback that it has escaped the prying eyes of the Government surveyors ... a place riddled with secrets, with hidden and nasty history, possessed of nothing remarkable but, as one characters says, 'the lure of nowhere.'"

Two strangers arrive in the opal mining town -- a place of two opposing cultures: the rough, boozing bushfolk and the churchgoing fundamentalists -- searching for a stepdaughter and a son who have mysteriously disappeared. Have they fallen under the spell of the mysterious and charismatic Oyster, drawn to the town by opals but also by the prospect of power? Young people in search of a better life drift under his spell and into his cult community.

This brilliant novel will evoke the holocaust at Waco, but it is also about the destructive power of greed, the racism of rural Australia, and the nature of good and evil. Hospital's "language is fascinating and extraordinarily powerful and her narrative shimmers and shifts like the displaced reality in the heat of Outer Maroo itself".