Yilkari: A desert suite

by Nicolas Rothwell, Alison Nampitjinpa Anderson

A Siberian composer named Valentin comes to a remote roadhouse in the Western Desert to find the narrator of Yilkari, whom he first met the night the Berlin Wall fell. They travel on together, leading us deeper into the desert in this mesmerising, unclassifiable book, co-written by the prize-winning author Nicolas Rothwell and his wife, the acclaimed artist Alison Nampitjinpa Anderson.

Later, he takes us driving on hidden tracks in search of other characters and other stories that transport the mind. He visits the magic mountain, even though it is not on any maps, whose peak seems to draw the light into itself, the heart of life.

Yilkari reveals its secrets, such secrets as it can reveal, through the conversations of its characters and their journeys into landscapes in which space and time are aspects of each other. Their exchanges touch on ways of knowing and speaking and imagining that are only within reach in the desert.

The authors are both characters and guides. This is a book of strange coincidences, of intricate, interlinked dreamings, of chance encounters in living landscapes where the thread of sound is almost too faint to hear when the evening sun is low, the best time for telling stories.

Nicolas Rothwell is the author of Quicksilver, which won a Prime Minister’s Literary Award, Belomor, and five other books. He lives in northern Australia.

Alison Nampitjinpa Anderson is a Luritja-Pintupi woman from the Western Desert community of Papunya. She is a prominent artist.

‘Reading it once is just the beginning.’ Stephen Romei, Saturday Paper

‘A fascinating journey of awakening and spiritual discovery.’ Jason Steger, Age Booklist

‘Telling and powerful…A stunning work of living landscapes, of dreaming, of storytelling to pass on to generations.’ Weekend Australian

272 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 29, 2025

About the author

Nicolas Rothwell is the award-winning author of Wings of the Kite-Hawk; The Red Highway, Journeys to the Interior and Another Country. He is the northern correspondent for The Australian.

Reviews

[Text Publishing]

The following reviews have been shared by Text Publishing, publisher of Yilkari: A desert suite.

‘A masterpiece...every Australian should read.’
Stephen Romei, Australian Book Review

‘A haunting dream about our nature.’
John Woinarski, Best Books of 2025, Conversation

‘Truly unique.’
The Westsider

‘…beautiful, mesmerising, and form-defying novel…I found myself blissfully lost in the meandering journeys of Yilkari’s characters and their deeply contemplative conversations.’
Paul Daley, Australian Book Review

‘A lyrical journey through Australia’s interior.’
Age

‘Reading it once is just the beginning.’
Stephen Romei, Saturday Paper

‘This is a book that invites reflection and makes you wonder…A compelling read for anyone interested in literature that explores identity and spirituality.’
Books+Publishing

‘A fascinating journey of awakening and spiritual discovery.’
Jason Steger, Age Booklist

‘Telling and powerful…A stunning work of living landscapes, of dreaming, of storytelling to pass on to generations.’
Weekend Australian

‘Asymptotic, hypnotic, mythic, Yilkari captivatingly defies classification…Recommended reading.’
Sydney Arts Guide

‘The most transformative novel you’ll read this year…Singular, closely written and memorable.’
RNZ Nine to Noon

‘Yilkari’s central idea is that Australia’s interior spaces are—spiritually—both impenetrable and menacing…These sparsely populated spaces embody the ineffable, powerful and unforgiving spirits of all who have dwelt there over thousands of years.’
Conversation

‘Mesmerising.’
Law Society Journal

‘The book you should be reading…A rare and deeply felt guide to Country and a search for belonging, with stretches of soaring, magisterial expansiveness.’
Qantas Magazine

‘Fascinating and candid…It carries the reader into sacred country.’
Adelaide Advertiser

‘Extraordinary, mesmeric, enigmatic’
Matilda Bookshop

‘...a love letter to the desert…vividly, enchantingly described.’
The Lane Bookshop

[Declan Fry]

Nicolas Rothwell has written eight books but Yilkari is a first: a collaboration, co-authored with his wife, Alison Nampitjinpa Anderson, a Luritja-Pintupi artist and writer from the Western Desert community of Papunya.

Yilkari offers a vision of the Western Desert filled with drifters and sundowners, vagrants, vagabonds, loners and backpackers and desert specialists. The world through which its unnamed narrator journeys, accompanied by various companions, is one you can hear and smell: desert oak and dunes, burnt mulga plains, ironwoods, sacred sites, conception places, station homesteads, bungalows, Queenslanders, ageing diesel pumps and sorry camps and caravan parks attended by frantic camp dogs.

An Australian born in Europe, the narrator seems to be a journalist who has returned, perhaps recently, from the Middle East. We learn that he is travelling west, to Karilwara, Ngaanyatjarra country. He is hoping to see an old friend and man of high degree, Mr Giles, a traditional doctor who is also a famed artist busy navigating the humbug of craven dealers, gallery folk and “a praetorian guard of collectors from down south”.

Over the following four chapters – each vignette is linked and works to refract its neighbours – he journeys further across the country. This trip becomes a search for a sense of place. The country is understood as something to be taken in, read and lived and travelled through, loved and feared and complicated by and invested in. A gateway through which the past becomes clearer and the self opens to a kind of unguarded reckoning.

The first of the narrator’s travelling companions is Jan Valentin, a Central European composer and “brother spirit” brought up in Siberia. Valentin reads the land as a wilderness. For the narrator, it offers refuge. Valentin’s presence prompts memories of the fall of the Berlin Wall, erected as the narrator is born, toppling by the time he first meets Valentin. Such memories are among the few we learn of the narrator’s past; mostly he serves as a receptive ear for the stories his companions offer.

Like Valentin, the narrator fears having expended or lost touch with the vitality of his art. His practice of listening and conversing mirrors the practice Valentin describes as embodying the ideal approach to music: “Sounds from outside come into you. They crystallise inside you.” The narrator’s relationship with his itinerant father has perhaps encouraged him to seek belonging.

Hence the book’s title, a word meaning, among other things, “clarity; everlastingness”. The narrator’s travelling companions are not just interlocutors but “guarding spirits”, each of whom offers a different but connected kind of Yilkari. One companion, Dylan, calls it the “dream of union”: a union that is both metaphysical and tied to place, to the fact of country as a living, charged presence.

Read on: https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/...

[Liz de Chastel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book on a work trip to the big city of Melbourne, such a contrast to this desert story. The book provides an insight to the ancient spirits of the desert through stories told between indigenous and non indigenous male desert drifters. I like this quote at the end - “This is where the insight comes. In empty desert, far from everything you know, in darkness, in boundlessness - it comes

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great to have Rothwell back on the shelves, this time with his wife. His outback stories have always captured me and this one is no different. Well maybe a bit more out there yet again …

[Brenda Rosser]

lovely