Amnesia

The two-time Booker Prize winner now gives us an exceedingly timely, exhilarating novel - at once dark, suspenseful, and seriously funny - that journeys to the place where the cyber underworld collides with international power politics.

When Gaby Baillieux releases the Angel Worm into Australia's prison computer system, hundreds of asylum-seekers walk free. And because the Americans run the prisons (let's be honest: as they do in so many parts of her country) the doors of some five thousand jails in the United States also open. Is this a mistake, or a declaration of cyber war? And does it have anything to do with the largely forgotten Battle of Brisbane between American and Australian forces in 1942? Or with the CIA-influenced coup in Australia in 1975? Felix Moore, known to himself as "our sole remaining left-wing journalist," is determined to write Gaby's biography in order to find the answers - to save her, his own career, and, perhaps, his country. But how to get Gaby - on the run, scared, confused, and angry - to cooperate?

Bringing together the world of hackers and radicals with the "special relationship" between the United States and Australia, and Australia and the CIA, Amnesia is a novel that speaks powerfully about the often hidden past - but most urgently about the more and more hidden present.