Reading The Bone Sparrow, Zana Fraillon's novel set in a detention centre, is a heightened experience; exquisite for its poetic sensibility and distressing for its bleak setting. In it, the child narrator Subhi's mother, Maá, tells him if everyone would listen to the stories deep down inside the earth, we would hear the whisperings of everything there is to hear, and if everyone did that, then maybe we wouldn't all get stuck so much. (Introduction)