Book excerpt: Spirit Wrestlers is a haunting, poetic novel by one of Australia's finest writers. It tells of the arrival in rural Australia of a cult religious group and of the effect the group's mysterious, closed existence has on surrounding communities and individual lives. Two teenagers, Johann and Ivan, the local and the newcomer, discover things in common, and differences. A decade on, Johann is involved in the Vietnam War, and Ivan has escaped into the corruption of city life. Their reunion forms the climax of the novel, a parallel to the Biblical story of Jacob wrestling the Angel. And then there is Olga, Ivan's young sister, who is now grown up. A novel about faith, and competing faiths, acts of terror and acts of peace, Spirit Wrestlers speaks straight to the heart about our unsettled, dangerous world.