The Island in the Mind is a sprawling, exhilarating evocation of European rivalry and ambition in the 17th century, the great age of geographical and intellectual discovery. Hall"s novel charts the allure of one of the last blank spaces on the globe, the great undiscovered southern continent. In the opening story, the mythical island becomes the subject of a revolutionary opera named "Terra Incognita", performed against a backdrop of court machinations and sexual intrigue. In the second narrative, a young Venetian woman takes in to her protection a human curio bound for the Turkish Sultan Mehmed"s menagerie, a strange savage with a "face so black you couldn"t make out the features". It is only in the final story that the island is fleetingly glimpsed by a band of privateers who are blown off course and stumble across the landmass "some 150 degrees east of Greenwich". Hall"s delightful stories combine to imagine the great uncharted regions of the globe with an impressively panoramic grandeur. At the heart of The Island in the Mind is the conviction that the search for the southern continent is both an inner, as well as a geographical, voyage of discovery. The reader, like a spectator at the opera, is drawn to imagine "this Terra Incognita, this unknown and empty land, as a mirror held up for us to see ourselves". Encompassing past, present and future perspectives on Australasia, The Island in the Mind offers a fascinating series of reflections. --Jerry Brotton