Wanting: A Novel

Wanting begins in 1839 when the famous Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin assumes governorship of the remote penal colony of Van Diemen's Land. His wife, Lady Jane, becomes captivated with a lively young Aboriginal girl called Mathinna, one of the few survivors of a brutal war of extermination waged against the island's original inhabitants. The Franklins adopt Mathinna, making her the subject of a grand social experiment - to determine whether science, Christianity, and reason can be imposed in the place of savagery, impulse, and desire.
Years later, on an expedition to find the fabled Northwest Passage, Sir John Franklin, with two ships and his crew, disappears in the Arctic. England is horrified by reports of cannibalism filtering back from search parties, no one more so than the most celebrated novelist of the day, Charles Dickens, for whom Franklin's story becomes a means to plumb the frozen depths of his own life.
As several lives are transfigured by unexpected events and unnoticed tragedies, Wanting transforms into a stunning meditation on the ways in which desire - and its denial - shape our lives.