AustLit

'Claire G. Coleman's third novel Enclave seems, at first, deceptively simple. Coleman is an Indigenous Australian; Enclave follows Terra Nullius (published by Hachette in Australia, and Small Beer in the US) and The Old Lie (also Hachette). In this novel, the language is direct and seems to be telling the perhaps ordinary story of a girl gaming up in a deliberately isolated city. which is keeping itself separate because of disasters happening elsewhere in the world. AU very straight-forward, and a few chapters in, if this were your first Coleman novel, you might wonder if there's a "but" coming; if you've read her others. you'll be on tenterhooks, just waiting. There is a "but," of course; there's sentences like this: "Heat from the roadway blasted up to meet the head raining down from the open sky; these competing heats did not feud, they united. formed a gang, went looking for trouble." Eventually, life for Christine. the protagonist, takes a dramatic twist and exposes everything that she's been taught, and the reader has so far learned, as a lie.' (Introduction)