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Little World
A mesmerising tale from one of Australia’s literary stars
'He has no notion of how to care for a saint. Even a small one. Does not even believe … Still. Catholic or not. You don't turn away a saint.'
In the north-western corner of 1950s Australia, a saint arrives at the home of a retired engineer, who unwittingly becomes her custodian. A girl of indeterminate age, her body remains as it was when she died, incorruptible. And though no one knows it, she is conscious, reflecting on past and present.
Little World stretches across continents and eras – from the Canal Zone in Panama and the island of Nauru all the way to the onset of Covid in contemporary Victoria. Beautiful, rich and strange, it weaves a tale of interconnected fates as characters grapple with the unknowable, and in this way come face to face with their deepest needs.
'He has no notion of how to care for a saint. Even a small one. Does not even believe … Still. Catholic or not. You don't turn away a saint.'
In the north-western corner of 1950s Australia, a saint arrives at the home of a retired engineer, who unwittingly becomes her custodian. A girl of indeterminate age, her body remains as it was when she died, incorruptible. And though no one knows it, she is conscious, reflecting on past and present.
Little World stretches across continents and eras – from the Canal Zone in Panama and the island of Nauru all the way to the onset of Covid in contemporary Victoria. Beautiful, rich and strange, it weaves a tale of interconnected fates as characters grapple with the unknowable, and in this way come face to face with their deepest needs.
120 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 29, 2025
25 people are currently reading
3380 people want to read
About the author
Josephine Rowe
27 books77 followersJosephine Rowe is the author of three story collections and a novel, A Loving, Faithful Animal (UQP, 2016). She holds fellowships from the Wallace Stegner program at Stanford University and the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She currently lives in Melbourne.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 72 reviews
February 10, 2025
thank you to edelweiss for the drc! that was so good 😭 FUCK. you have to have a pretty high tolerance for litfic and dense, prosaic writing, but if you can handle that, this is SUCH a good story and I can see myself rereading it and experiencing it in a different way in the future. i wasn't expecting to be bowled over by something with so few pages, but it really, really got my ass. Mathilde, I love you. mothers and caretakers of the world, I love you. Lesbians, I love you!!!
November 8, 2025
2.5 stars !!
this had some moments of truly stunning lines and eloquent prose. but lyricism gets to a point sometimes where you’re sacrificing clarity for style. all that to say that meaning was lost and i just didn’t get The Point at times to be completely honest! i did really enjoy the middle sections and the brief looks we get into the “saint’s” perspective but aside from that i felt like the prose and flow of this was muddied.
this had some moments of truly stunning lines and eloquent prose. but lyricism gets to a point sometimes where you’re sacrificing clarity for style. all that to say that meaning was lost and i just didn’t get The Point at times to be completely honest! i did really enjoy the middle sections and the brief looks we get into the “saint’s” perspective but aside from that i felt like the prose and flow of this was muddied.
December 29, 2024
Given that I finished this at the midway point between Christmas and New Year's, and I am one of those who is packaged with seasonal depression, I didn't think I would have the energy to really get into this book - slim in size but dense and deep. But I found so much to love. I love Rowe's writing style, staccato bursts of words, phrases, ideas, thoughts, dialogue, bringing the story together in strings, and hiding the plot from immediate view like a soft fondant protecting her cake. I love her treatment of her characters, each one belonging to a bold stretch of time, indecisive here, damned decisive there. I love trying to sort out the why of what I was reading as it unfolded and folded back on itself over the course of decades in such a thin little book.
I'll read this again and again.
Many thanks to the author, to Edelweiss, and to Transit Books for the digital ARC of this book that I received in exchange for this honest review. And please take the time to look further into Transit Books - a publishing house that is also a nonprofit, committed to the discovery and promotion of enduring works that carry readers across borders and communities.
I'll read this again and again.
Many thanks to the author, to Edelweiss, and to Transit Books for the digital ARC of this book that I received in exchange for this honest review. And please take the time to look further into Transit Books - a publishing house that is also a nonprofit, committed to the discovery and promotion of enduring works that carry readers across borders and communities.
December 13, 2025
unsure as to whether this book had a plot
October 22, 2025
lovely writing but i think it wasn’t literal enough? if that makes sense?
July 2, 2025
A novella crafted into only 136 intriguing pages, Little World is Josephine Rowe's fourth book. She has previously published the 2016 novel A Loving Faithful Animal and two short story collections. As you can see in my review, it was the her first collection Tarcutta Wake (2012) that alerted me to the promise of this writer:
Little World has that strange compelling quality too. This is the kind of book that makes a reader stop to think: why is there this episode that seems to be out of place or irrelevant? Josephine Rowe is too good a writer to be placing random episodes without purpose, so we readers have to do the work of interpreting opaque or ambiguous sequences. For me, the work of multiple re-readings is worth it...
Written in three parts, the book begins with the arresting image of a retired engineer taking delivery of a (maybe) saint. Orrin Bird is somewhere in the remote bush, and the nameless saint arrives by horse float, and just as well, because a more appropriate conveyance, such as a hearse, would have attracted attention, prying in the guise of condolences. Condolences would not have been unwarranted because it is his old friend Kaspar Isaksen who has sent him this bizarre bequest. Kaspar had cared for her in a box of tamanu wood that Orrin had crafted without knowing its purpose, but Kaspar, haunted by horror, has drunk himself to death. It is Orrin to whom he entrusts the responsibility while, so the solicitor tells him, the process for potential beatification continues.
This strange but convincing scenario is the vehicle for historical allusions about events that have been largely obliterated by time and indifference:
[These events take place on the island of Nauru, known to Australians for the phosphate mining that destroyed its landscape into a moonscape, and for its reincarnation as a detention centre for refugees. This novella does not allow it to be out-of-sight and out-of-mind.]
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2025/07/02/l...
Beautifully crafted, powerful stories that made me stop and reflect, and remember. Many of them are the kind of stories that trigger memories of similar situations. This collection is one that will have the reader spend as much time thinking as actually reading.
Little World has that strange compelling quality too. This is the kind of book that makes a reader stop to think: why is there this episode that seems to be out of place or irrelevant? Josephine Rowe is too good a writer to be placing random episodes without purpose, so we readers have to do the work of interpreting opaque or ambiguous sequences. For me, the work of multiple re-readings is worth it...
Written in three parts, the book begins with the arresting image of a retired engineer taking delivery of a (maybe) saint. Orrin Bird is somewhere in the remote bush, and the nameless saint arrives by horse float, and just as well, because a more appropriate conveyance, such as a hearse, would have attracted attention, prying in the guise of condolences. Condolences would not have been unwarranted because it is his old friend Kaspar Isaksen who has sent him this bizarre bequest. Kaspar had cared for her in a box of tamanu wood that Orrin had crafted without knowing its purpose, but Kaspar, haunted by horror, has drunk himself to death. It is Orrin to whom he entrusts the responsibility while, so the solicitor tells him, the process for potential beatification continues.
Orrin—not devout, or not in a Catholic sense—is conflicted about the nature of this legacy. He has no notion of how to care for a saint. Even a small one. Does not even believe. Not in any one God, attended by angels and casting his divine judgement down from On High. If he has gods, they are many, and they themselves tend—are the kind who get their hands dirty and wet, who are the Dirt and the Wet. And yes, the Dry. Terrible Dry, who doubtless has no comprehension nor will towards terror. Just is. As are the gods Salt and Reef and Ant Mound. The birds who tell him whether he is or isn't home.
Still. Catholic or not. You don't turn away a saint. (p.5)
This strange but convincing scenario is the vehicle for historical allusions about events that have been largely obliterated by time and indifference:
In the years that followed, Kaspar Isaksen took up the task of methodically drinking himself to death. His letters came clogged with remorse for fates he'd not learnt of until after the war. For instance how, during the occupation, his former charges had been rounded up on their cultivated strip of coast and loaded onto small boats, and the boats towed out to sea, shelled and sunk. Thus leprosy was removed from the island. (p.27, see Japanese WW2 atrocities on occupied Nauru.)
[These events take place on the island of Nauru, known to Australians for the phosphate mining that destroyed its landscape into a moonscape, and for its reincarnation as a detention centre for refugees. This novella does not allow it to be out-of-sight and out-of-mind.]
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2025/07/02/l...
July 9, 2025
3.5. Enjoyed this little book about a saint in WA and truly did not know what to expect, lol
November 7, 2025
Late start to Novella November but an epic story told with minimal words.
December 16, 2025
A very short read but layered with haunting depth. Three acts? A custodian of a saint, a traveller searching for meaning and a buried horse float as a bunker against the impending doom. Sparse, deep and affecting. Great to see Australian fiction pushing these boundaries.
November 7, 2025
Rowe's prose arrives luminous. Sentences that cut clean. Language so precise it seems to wound. Little World contains genuine artistry—the kind that makes you stop mid-sentence to re-read, to taste the language again. Yet artistry alone doesn't constitute narrative, and this slender book sometimes prioritizes the beautiful over the substantial.
The setup: Orrin Bird, 1950s Western Australia, receives a mysterious box. Inside: a child. Preserved. Incorruptible. Saint or object? Miracle or machinery? The boundaries blur immediately, intentionally. The girl remains semi-conscious, trapped in her own small world, aware but unable to affect anything. She exists as witness and weight—spiritual anchor and burden simultaneously.
Rowe structures this as triptych. First act: Orrin and the saint in isolated desert. Second act split into two: Matti (1970s, driving across Nullarbor with the saint's box somehow in her vehicle, haunted by forced adoption) and Syb (Covid-era Victoria, grieving, encountering elderly woman who claims past connection to the saint). The saint threads through all three, her consciousness flickering at intervals.
What works brilliantly: the prose itself. Rowe captures Australian landscape with incantatory precision—heat as theology, drought as divinity, the land itself as sacred force. Her treatment of marginal characters, isolated figures struggling against time and circumstance, contains genuine compassion. The saint's fractured consciousness—aware yet powerless—functions as perfect metaphor for the voiceless, the used, those whose bodies become objects of others' faith.
The thematic preoccupations substantial: violence embedded in reverence, the question of grace in a world that offers little grace, how small acts of kindness can pierce indifference. The novel's interrogation of who gets deemed sacred—who gets preserved, whose stories matter—carries urgency. References to Nauru's phosphate mining devastation, to forced adoption systems, to colonial violence: these ground the spiritual in historical atrocity.
But here's where three stars becomes accurate: the triptych structure, while formally elegant, occasionally fragments emotional continuity. The shift from Orrin to Matti feels disjunctive. The pivot to Syb even more so. We're offered glimpses of characters rather than depths. Rowe seems more interested in atmosphere than in psychological interiority—we're given how these people appear, not always why they think as they do.
Additionally, the saint herself—despite being nominally central—remains somewhat opaque. The novel seems deliberately unclear about her origins, her actual status, her capacity for agency. This ambiguity could feel profound; instead it occasionally reads as underexplored. We learn fragments about her past. We glimpse her consciousness. But we never quite understand who she is beyond suffering made incarnate.
The novella's brevity (144 pages) works both for and against it. For: every word carries weight, nothing wastes space, the compression creates intensity. Against: certain character arcs need expansion, certain relationships need more tending, the emotional payoff sometimes arrives too swiftly to fully metabolize.
The contemporary section feels rushed. Syb's story arrives compressed, her emotional journey abbreviated, the climate-catastrophe framing (fires threatening, the world's end) imported somewhat abruptly. The final question—"are we in the Before or the After?"—lands intellectually but hasn't been earned through sufficient narrative development.
Some readers will experience this compression as poetic. Others as evasive. The ambiguity about whether the saint is genuinely miraculous or genuinely traumatized corpse remains purposefully unresolved. This could feel appropriately mysterious; it could also feel like Rowe avoiding commitment to any particular stance.
Yet three stars acknowledges the genuine artistry, the essential questions raised, the stunning prose. Rowe deserves recognition for attempting something challenging—triptych narrative, mythic tone, compressed emotional space—and mostly succeeding. The book lingers. The language haunts. The questions persist.
Three stars because Little World contains brilliance alongside underdevelopment, because the prose dazzles even when the plot meanders, because Rowe reaches for something visionary and nearly achieves it. Not fully realized (too compressed, too elliptical, too willing to sacrifice narrative depth for stylistic grace) but genuinely attempting transformation. For readers who prioritize language above plot, incantation above development: this will transcend. For those needing character depth alongside beauty: you'll admire this more than love it.
The setup: Orrin Bird, 1950s Western Australia, receives a mysterious box. Inside: a child. Preserved. Incorruptible. Saint or object? Miracle or machinery? The boundaries blur immediately, intentionally. The girl remains semi-conscious, trapped in her own small world, aware but unable to affect anything. She exists as witness and weight—spiritual anchor and burden simultaneously.
Rowe structures this as triptych. First act: Orrin and the saint in isolated desert. Second act split into two: Matti (1970s, driving across Nullarbor with the saint's box somehow in her vehicle, haunted by forced adoption) and Syb (Covid-era Victoria, grieving, encountering elderly woman who claims past connection to the saint). The saint threads through all three, her consciousness flickering at intervals.
What works brilliantly: the prose itself. Rowe captures Australian landscape with incantatory precision—heat as theology, drought as divinity, the land itself as sacred force. Her treatment of marginal characters, isolated figures struggling against time and circumstance, contains genuine compassion. The saint's fractured consciousness—aware yet powerless—functions as perfect metaphor for the voiceless, the used, those whose bodies become objects of others' faith.
The thematic preoccupations substantial: violence embedded in reverence, the question of grace in a world that offers little grace, how small acts of kindness can pierce indifference. The novel's interrogation of who gets deemed sacred—who gets preserved, whose stories matter—carries urgency. References to Nauru's phosphate mining devastation, to forced adoption systems, to colonial violence: these ground the spiritual in historical atrocity.
But here's where three stars becomes accurate: the triptych structure, while formally elegant, occasionally fragments emotional continuity. The shift from Orrin to Matti feels disjunctive. The pivot to Syb even more so. We're offered glimpses of characters rather than depths. Rowe seems more interested in atmosphere than in psychological interiority—we're given how these people appear, not always why they think as they do.
Additionally, the saint herself—despite being nominally central—remains somewhat opaque. The novel seems deliberately unclear about her origins, her actual status, her capacity for agency. This ambiguity could feel profound; instead it occasionally reads as underexplored. We learn fragments about her past. We glimpse her consciousness. But we never quite understand who she is beyond suffering made incarnate.
The novella's brevity (144 pages) works both for and against it. For: every word carries weight, nothing wastes space, the compression creates intensity. Against: certain character arcs need expansion, certain relationships need more tending, the emotional payoff sometimes arrives too swiftly to fully metabolize.
The contemporary section feels rushed. Syb's story arrives compressed, her emotional journey abbreviated, the climate-catastrophe framing (fires threatening, the world's end) imported somewhat abruptly. The final question—"are we in the Before or the After?"—lands intellectually but hasn't been earned through sufficient narrative development.
Some readers will experience this compression as poetic. Others as evasive. The ambiguity about whether the saint is genuinely miraculous or genuinely traumatized corpse remains purposefully unresolved. This could feel appropriately mysterious; it could also feel like Rowe avoiding commitment to any particular stance.
Yet three stars acknowledges the genuine artistry, the essential questions raised, the stunning prose. Rowe deserves recognition for attempting something challenging—triptych narrative, mythic tone, compressed emotional space—and mostly succeeding. The book lingers. The language haunts. The questions persist.
Three stars because Little World contains brilliance alongside underdevelopment, because the prose dazzles even when the plot meanders, because Rowe reaches for something visionary and nearly achieves it. Not fully realized (too compressed, too elliptical, too willing to sacrifice narrative depth for stylistic grace) but genuinely attempting transformation. For readers who prioritize language above plot, incantation above development: this will transcend. For those needing character depth alongside beauty: you'll admire this more than love it.
Read
February 9, 2026Longlisted for the 2026 RofC US/Canada Prize
Incorruptible. Who'd have guessed. (No one, that's who.)
That her body did not corrupt was not miraculous.
It was perverse. That her flesh did not retain any trace of violence was a betrayal. It was absolution—she knew about absolution, what and whom it was really for—and if it had been up to her, she would not have given it. If it had been up to her, she would have rained fire and much worse upon that man and all men like him. Called all the ants down from the anthills. Made it slow. If it had been up to her.
It was a curse in some places, some parts of the world:
May the earth not eat you.
(10)
*
She is accustomed to being the only one awake. Has not slept through a full night in a long time. Possibly decades. Wonders how her life might be if she could achieve this one simple act, this common mercy. Seven, even six solid hours a night—how she might spend that clarity. She imagines assurance drawn from the fixed forms of things, their clean, unambiguous delineations.
Maybe that was the dream, though, the great illusion:
that of separateness.
(30)
*
That was that. End Act One.
She knows the tropes of three-act plays. Brecht, Ibsen; Chekhov—the protagonist announcing themselves and showing their open palms to the audience, the gun on the wall from the first act going off in the third.
Anything could be the gun on the wall. Sally could be the gun on the wall.
There was always the hope. Some small secret readiness, protected.
(33)
*
Even at seventeen, she'd held no romantic illusions about purity. The river's current carried detritus, visible and not: household rubbish, stormwater-borne effluent, the carcasses of unlucky marsupials and rodents and birds, engine oil and the toxic runoff from factories, muck from slaughterhouses and illegal septic systems, and God knew what else.
But it fed life, all the same: trees snaked their roots into it, animals came to drink, yabbies whistled silver from their muddy burrows. It could keep her, too. It could bear her off, aloft. Somewhere. Who said water had no memory.
(59)
*
There are people in the world who've never thrown
a plate at a wall. Think of that.
(88)
_____
Longlist, In-Progress Current Rankings
—On Earth As It Is Beneath, Ana Paula Maia (tr. Padma Viswanathan)
—Hothouse Bloom, Austyn Wohlers
—Iris & the Dead, Miranda Schreiber
—Small Scale Sinners, Mahreen Sohail
—Little World, Josephine Rowe
—Dreaming of Dead People, Rosalind Belben
—Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation, Sarah Yahm
[up next: The Endless Week, Laura Vázquez (tr. Alex Niemi)]
_____
Transit Books is a publishing house in the bay area that is also a nonprofit, committed to the discovery and promotion of enduring works that carry readers across borders and communities.
Incorruptible. Who'd have guessed. (No one, that's who.)
That her body did not corrupt was not miraculous.
It was perverse. That her flesh did not retain any trace of violence was a betrayal. It was absolution—she knew about absolution, what and whom it was really for—and if it had been up to her, she would not have given it. If it had been up to her, she would have rained fire and much worse upon that man and all men like him. Called all the ants down from the anthills. Made it slow. If it had been up to her.
It was a curse in some places, some parts of the world:
May the earth not eat you.
(10)
*
She is accustomed to being the only one awake. Has not slept through a full night in a long time. Possibly decades. Wonders how her life might be if she could achieve this one simple act, this common mercy. Seven, even six solid hours a night—how she might spend that clarity. She imagines assurance drawn from the fixed forms of things, their clean, unambiguous delineations.
Maybe that was the dream, though, the great illusion:
that of separateness.
(30)
*
That was that. End Act One.
She knows the tropes of three-act plays. Brecht, Ibsen; Chekhov—the protagonist announcing themselves and showing their open palms to the audience, the gun on the wall from the first act going off in the third.
Anything could be the gun on the wall. Sally could be the gun on the wall.
There was always the hope. Some small secret readiness, protected.
(33)
*
Even at seventeen, she'd held no romantic illusions about purity. The river's current carried detritus, visible and not: household rubbish, stormwater-borne effluent, the carcasses of unlucky marsupials and rodents and birds, engine oil and the toxic runoff from factories, muck from slaughterhouses and illegal septic systems, and God knew what else.
But it fed life, all the same: trees snaked their roots into it, animals came to drink, yabbies whistled silver from their muddy burrows. It could keep her, too. It could bear her off, aloft. Somewhere. Who said water had no memory.
(59)
*
There are people in the world who've never thrown
a plate at a wall. Think of that.
(88)
_____
Longlist, In-Progress Current Rankings
—On Earth As It Is Beneath, Ana Paula Maia (tr. Padma Viswanathan)
—Hothouse Bloom, Austyn Wohlers
—Iris & the Dead, Miranda Schreiber
—Small Scale Sinners, Mahreen Sohail
—Little World, Josephine Rowe
—Dreaming of Dead People, Rosalind Belben
—Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation, Sarah Yahm
[up next: The Endless Week, Laura Vázquez (tr. Alex Niemi)]
_____
Transit Books is a publishing house in the bay area that is also a nonprofit, committed to the discovery and promotion of enduring works that carry readers across borders and communities.
November 13, 2025
Oh wow.
This book is so magnificently written that when I started it as an audiobook, I had to stop and borrow a physical copy from the library, I needed to see the words on the page.
We follow three intertwined lives: Orrin in the 1950s, Matti in the 1970s, and Syb in 2020. Their stories are bound together by the remains of one nameless girl, and maybe-saint, left in Orrin’s care by a friend.
I adored this book. I’m usually not a fan of novels without quotation marks, but it works here; it feels more like poetry than a novel. Plus it’s nice and short to help you hit that goal.
Four and a half stars.
This book is so magnificently written that when I started it as an audiobook, I had to stop and borrow a physical copy from the library, I needed to see the words on the page.
We follow three intertwined lives: Orrin in the 1950s, Matti in the 1970s, and Syb in 2020. Their stories are bound together by the remains of one nameless girl, and maybe-saint, left in Orrin’s care by a friend.
I adored this book. I’m usually not a fan of novels without quotation marks, but it works here; it feels more like poetry than a novel. Plus it’s nice and short to help you hit that goal.
Four and a half stars.
June 16, 2025
loved this weird little book!!
July 18, 2025
I appreciated the beautiful writing and there was something intriguing about the story. The idea of an incorruptible body with a form of consciousness and still having an impact on people and the natural world. It was a short intense read that I enjoyed.
November 17, 2025
Very lovely short read, definitely recommend. I’m not a big fan of this style of storytelling but I know a lot of friends that do so the three stars is more of a biased review
December 6, 2025
Loved the POV from the saint but do feel like the story lost its way a bit… some beautiful writing but left me feeling like there was no purpose
December 30, 2025
What was even happening
January 7, 2026
For such a short book, it was definitely hard to follow
January 19, 2026
Probably need the assistance of a book club to unpack the second half of this.
December 17, 2025
I agree with the reviews on how the meaning got lost at some points. I did not enjoy the writing at all, beautiful as it may be. I did enjoy Orin's and the view of the Saint but other than that, not a fan.
March 14, 2025
A cool little book! Following the body of a deceased saint we meet many people in different time periods and see how they encounter her. In structure it reminds me a very small amount of North Woods and the house being the connection point there. The idea that a physical object (feels weird calling a body an object) can link people is very interesting to me. Some very beautiful writing throughout as well! Thanks to Transit for the advanced copy and looking forward to the pub date August 12, 2025.
June 15, 2025
Author Josephine Rowe’s latest novella LITTLE WORLD (Black Inc 2025) is a literary gem with sparkling and evocative prose, nuanced and unforgettable characters and a suitable amount of ambiguity and complexity to encourage deep thought about profound and universal themes.
Divided into three ‘acts’, with the second act also divided into two, the book explores divinity, humanity, feminism, diversity, loneliness, isolation, self-sufficiency (in both body and spirit), adventure, grief, institutionalisation and preconceived world views, violence, freedom and the quest for self.
The powerful opening concerns a young saint, gifted to a retired engineer living in rural 1950’s Australia. He has no idea how to care for a saint, or indeed any particular beliefs about sainthood but nevertheless he accepts that this is a gift from which he cannot turn away. He doesn’t know it, but the saint has some form of consciousness, and so we are privileged to ‘hear’ or intuit her thoughts about life, her background and history and the forces that have led her to where she is today. The story then moves across continents and eras, with a series of interconnected tales that chart the fates of several other main characters all challenged by their histories, their current situations and their impossible dreams.
LITTLE WORLD is a rich, lush, strange, atmospheric, ethereal story with contemporary and pragmatic sections that cut through the magical with vivid and brutal realities. The idea that something is ‘lucid and sober – and seeming no more implausible than anything else’ captures the heart of this novella. It moves through time and space, and from multiple perspectives, with the gentle and tender warmth of water finding its own level. With the lightest of touches, it approaches issues of great controversy or division or pain or weight, skimming over them with sharp literary prose that piques our appetite but never fully satiates. This is a story of questions rather than answers, of problems not solutions, and of thoughtfulness rather than didactics. A truly beautiful, vibrant, esoteric and strange tale.
Divided into three ‘acts’, with the second act also divided into two, the book explores divinity, humanity, feminism, diversity, loneliness, isolation, self-sufficiency (in both body and spirit), adventure, grief, institutionalisation and preconceived world views, violence, freedom and the quest for self.
The powerful opening concerns a young saint, gifted to a retired engineer living in rural 1950’s Australia. He has no idea how to care for a saint, or indeed any particular beliefs about sainthood but nevertheless he accepts that this is a gift from which he cannot turn away. He doesn’t know it, but the saint has some form of consciousness, and so we are privileged to ‘hear’ or intuit her thoughts about life, her background and history and the forces that have led her to where she is today. The story then moves across continents and eras, with a series of interconnected tales that chart the fates of several other main characters all challenged by their histories, their current situations and their impossible dreams.
LITTLE WORLD is a rich, lush, strange, atmospheric, ethereal story with contemporary and pragmatic sections that cut through the magical with vivid and brutal realities. The idea that something is ‘lucid and sober – and seeming no more implausible than anything else’ captures the heart of this novella. It moves through time and space, and from multiple perspectives, with the gentle and tender warmth of water finding its own level. With the lightest of touches, it approaches issues of great controversy or division or pain or weight, skimming over them with sharp literary prose that piques our appetite but never fully satiates. This is a story of questions rather than answers, of problems not solutions, and of thoughtfulness rather than didactics. A truly beautiful, vibrant, esoteric and strange tale.
November 16, 2025
Thank god that’s over.
This book had wonderfully strong and original roots, but failed greatly in execution. Rowe is known as the author of short stories and poetry, things she excels at. However, this attempt at a longer-form story falls flat, mainly because the book suffers from a major identity crisis: is it trying to be a short novel or a longer short story? Is it prose or poetry? Rowe's style of writing, whilst effective in shorter forms, fails here - random descriptions of sunlight falling between leaves, or the motion of hair in the ocean are beautifully poetic but totally distract in a novel. Furthermore, poetic techniques such as partially formed or incomplete sentences are just plain annoying in this form.
I loved the premise - a semi-sentient saint in the australian outback genuinely turns medieval tales of saints and religious icons on their head, and is all the more striking for it. Tilde's solitary life protecting the saint while gently accepting its blessing reflects histories of hermits and monks dedicated to protecting saints and relics. Finally, the idea of the saint being partially sentient and able to reflect on her own history, scoring the idea that she is a saint is quite thought provoking: would other saints have viewed themselves as worthy of such a position?
Unfortunately, this was a fabulous premise combined with something that came across as a year 11 writing assignment.
This book had wonderfully strong and original roots, but failed greatly in execution. Rowe is known as the author of short stories and poetry, things she excels at. However, this attempt at a longer-form story falls flat, mainly because the book suffers from a major identity crisis: is it trying to be a short novel or a longer short story? Is it prose or poetry? Rowe's style of writing, whilst effective in shorter forms, fails here - random descriptions of sunlight falling between leaves, or the motion of hair in the ocean are beautifully poetic but totally distract in a novel. Furthermore, poetic techniques such as partially formed or incomplete sentences are just plain annoying in this form.
I loved the premise - a semi-sentient saint in the australian outback genuinely turns medieval tales of saints and religious icons on their head, and is all the more striking for it. Tilde's solitary life protecting the saint while gently accepting its blessing reflects histories of hermits and monks dedicated to protecting saints and relics. Finally, the idea of the saint being partially sentient and able to reflect on her own history, scoring the idea that she is a saint is quite thought provoking: would other saints have viewed themselves as worthy of such a position?
Unfortunately, this was a fabulous premise combined with something that came across as a year 11 writing assignment.
November 8, 2025
The premise is bizarre in the best way: a man in 1950s Australia gets delivered a box containing a preserved child who might be a saint. From there it follows different people across different decades who end up connected to her somehow.
The writing is genuinely beautiful. Rowe has this way of describing the Australian landscape that makes even the emptiness feel significant. And the whole concept of this saint girl being conscious but trapped, just observing everything, is both sad and strangely compelling. You end up caring about all these lonely characters trying to figure out what to do with this responsibility they never asked for.
It does jump around between time periods and you have to piece things together yourself, but I actually found that pretty engaging. The book deals with some heavy stuff like colonial violence and forced adoption, but it never feels preachy about it. Just kind of lets you sit with these questions about faith and care and what we owe to each other.
Some sections feel a bit rushed, especially the modern day part (the COVID 19...???), but honestly the whole thing is so short that it works. It's one of those books where the atmosphere and the language matter more than having everything spelled out for you.
The writing is genuinely beautiful. Rowe has this way of describing the Australian landscape that makes even the emptiness feel significant. And the whole concept of this saint girl being conscious but trapped, just observing everything, is both sad and strangely compelling. You end up caring about all these lonely characters trying to figure out what to do with this responsibility they never asked for.
It does jump around between time periods and you have to piece things together yourself, but I actually found that pretty engaging. The book deals with some heavy stuff like colonial violence and forced adoption, but it never feels preachy about it. Just kind of lets you sit with these questions about faith and care and what we owe to each other.
Some sections feel a bit rushed, especially the modern day part (the COVID 19...???), but honestly the whole thing is so short that it works. It's one of those books where the atmosphere and the language matter more than having everything spelled out for you.
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December 22, 2024(This review is based on an advanced reader’s copy provided by Edelweiss.)
~3 stars. A strange little book. Definitely well-written at a prose level, it was never a chore to read, but I’m not sure what to make of it or what it all adds up to. It’s not that I need every question to be answered, I’m generally fine with ambiguous endings—it’s more that in this case I don’t even know what questions to ask. I enjoyed reading it, but it didn’t really go anywhere. Like, okay, there’s a saint, and various people encounter her…but so what? It’s not clear to me that the presence of the saint significantly changes anything about the other characters’ lives, so what’s the point of her being there?
That said, I was sufficiently interested that I would try this author’s other books.
Recommended for fans of Bitter Water Opera.
Content notes: Child sexual abuse/assault. Adoption, from the biological mother’s perspective. Description of self-managed abortions via various folk remedies.
~3 stars. A strange little book. Definitely well-written at a prose level, it was never a chore to read, but I’m not sure what to make of it or what it all adds up to. It’s not that I need every question to be answered, I’m generally fine with ambiguous endings—it’s more that in this case I don’t even know what questions to ask. I enjoyed reading it, but it didn’t really go anywhere. Like, okay, there’s a saint, and various people encounter her…but so what? It’s not clear to me that the presence of the saint significantly changes anything about the other characters’ lives, so what’s the point of her being there?
That said, I was sufficiently interested that I would try this author’s other books.
Recommended for fans of Bitter Water Opera.
Content notes: Child sexual abuse/assault. Adoption, from the biological mother’s perspective. Description of self-managed abortions via various folk remedies.
August 5, 2025
A literary fiction tale, Little World (2025) by Josephine Rowe is a novella of three interconnected stories. It begins in the Kimberely in the 1950s Australia, with the delivery of a box containing a body of a saint – a young unnamed girl. Then it’s 1976 and Matti is on a road trip in a Combi van across Australia’s Nullarbor Plain. The final short story is a young couple in current day Victoria, as the child saint touches the lives of each of the protagonists across the various timelines, with a mystical, surreal feel. An unusual novella with a strong character focus that has a reflective atmospheric four star read rating. As always, the opinions herein are totally my own, freely given and without any inducement.
November 19, 2025
The book leans into the strange in a way that is both intriguing and occasionally frustrating. What stood out most to me were the quiet links between the stories, little threads that tie the characters and moments together even when the narrative feels like it is drifting in unexpected directions. I also really enjoyed the presence of the saint and the way that voice adds a layer of mystery and texture to the book.
At the same time, I found the overall experience somewhat disjointed. The structure feels intentionally fragmented but it also left me feeling unmoored more often than I would have liked. There were moments when the lyricism worked beautifully and others where it made the story feel distant. I also think that the book suffers once the Saint’s POV is diminished.
At the same time, I found the overall experience somewhat disjointed. The structure feels intentionally fragmented but it also left me feeling unmoored more often than I would have liked. There were moments when the lyricism worked beautifully and others where it made the story feel distant. I also think that the book suffers once the Saint’s POV is diminished.
January 10, 2026
“Rooms too small to haunt, you’d think. But of course no place is too small.”
What a lovely way to sum up the many reasons to pick up novellas like this.
Josephine Rowe writes like a much older woman. She has worldliness and beauty in her rooms in this story that usually belong to people of older generations. I was surprised to find she was younger than I.
Don’t be misled. Human characters are the stars of this little drama. The child-saint is slightly off-center though omnipresent. And there is no dogmatic nonsense to distract from her story.
Please support the publisher, Transit Books, a nonprofit based in San Francisco promoting “enduring works that carry readers across borders and communities.” Transitbooks.org
What a lovely way to sum up the many reasons to pick up novellas like this.
Josephine Rowe writes like a much older woman. She has worldliness and beauty in her rooms in this story that usually belong to people of older generations. I was surprised to find she was younger than I.
Don’t be misled. Human characters are the stars of this little drama. The child-saint is slightly off-center though omnipresent. And there is no dogmatic nonsense to distract from her story.
Please support the publisher, Transit Books, a nonprofit based in San Francisco promoting “enduring works that carry readers across borders and communities.” Transitbooks.org
November 11, 2025
Deeply interesting premise but losing the focus on the saint (who is a sentient girl) and instead honing in on three people who interact with her weakens it. The girl's perspective, angry and wistful and watching, is far stronger and more compelling. We see the world through her eyes as she continues on, unable to be at rest, frustrated with the label of "saint." If that were the whole novel or at least most of it, Rowe would have a knock out. But the three characters who "find" the saint are far less compelling. Mathilde is the best of the three, and more time spent with her would have been great.
December 9, 2025
I didn’t really know what to expect going into Little World, but it turned out to be a great read. The lesbian representation was wonderful, and the story also brought in themes of identity, connection, and finding your place in a world that doesn’t always make sense. Despite being a short novel, it managed to build atmosphere, emotion, and tension in a really satisfying way.
A great read with strong representation, intriguing worldbuilding, and characters who stay with you long after the final page.
A great read with strong representation, intriguing worldbuilding, and characters who stay with you long after the final page.
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