Karan

Atomic testing in the Australian scrub has strewn death everywhere: the ""rolling mist'' leaves a green-smeared sky, featherless birds, and cancerous or slaughtered Aborigines. Anawari, stolen from his tribe as a child and raised to be a so-called cleric, unwillingly helps his European bosses to trap other blacks with drugged oranges, cages, and computersfor research purposes. In an act of ``treason,'' Anawari breaks away from his false role and from his menacing white fiancee Ann, to burrow under the parched earth in quest of his origins. In this eerie, disturbing second book of a ``nuclear trilogy'' (after the acclaimed Walg, or ``womb''), the pseudonymous B. Wongar, himself part European and Aborigine, joins mega-tech nightmare with the nature mythology of the gentle tribes who share their karan, or ``spirit double,'' with the wise and sentient trees. The story becomes increasingly magical as Anawari literally finds his rootsaided by the sacred elder Numuruamong the people of the Blood Gum Tree. A moving transformation occurs in Anawari, and in the greening of the once-ruined land. U.K. rights: Laurence Pollinger; translation rights: ICM. November