Not a year passes without someone claiming to have stumbled upon the legendary Tasmanian tiger. A flash of stripes, a tawny blur, strange paw prints in the mud; are these genuine sightings or mass hallucinations suffered by a populace whose grief for the extinct icon is stuck in a state of collective denial? 'Tassie loves the tiger now ... this entire country is going to be saying sorry forever'; so muses one character of Sarah Kanake's first novel, in which an absent species is both metaphor and backdrop to a drama about human loss and 'the unending, circling misery' of not letting go.