The original novel, by James Vance Marshall, has just been reissued by the New York Review of Books, and it turns out to be much less bleak than Roeg's film, but equally riveting.

Certainly, the book deserves a wider audience than it got when it was published in 1959, if only because of Marshall's - a pseudonym for Donald Gordon Payne - evocation of the Australian outback, which is just as much "other" as the Aborigine culture that the two children view with different attitudes.

It's a complex book that was lucky - sort of - to be seized upon by such a talented filmmaker, even if he did twist it for his own ends. But the book is still here and still worth reading.

In the Pipeline...

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will publish Deep, a new book by James Nestor about freediving, in which divers descend hundreds of feet below the surface without oxygen tanks ... St. Martin's will publish a book about Machine Gun Kelly's 1933 abduction of a Texas millionaire that was one of the first crimes prosecuted under the Lindbergh Law. Kidnapped will be written by Joe Urschel, a former journalist for Gannett and director of the Newseum ... St. Martin's will also publish yet another biography of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, this one by Barbara Leaming, who has already written one book about her subject, in 2001.

Mike Browning's Word of the Week...

cruciverbalist: someone who creates or is expert at crossword puzzles.