In the Victorian age, love between two men is a crime. At Port Arthur, it is a sentence to be erased. Bewley Tuck and John Kelly are convicted of attempting an "unnatural act" and sentenced to fifteen years. Their destination is Port Arthur, the most feared penal settlement of the British Empire, located in Van Diemen's Land, an island at the edge of the known world where Britain sends those it wishes to forget. There, behind sandstone walls, the authorities are testing a new idea. The "separate system" promises reform not through the lash but through silence, solitude and hooded anonymity: a slow, deliberate dismantling of a man's very self, so that a new and obedient one can be built in its place. For two men already condemned for who they are, it is the cruellest punishment of all. Thrown among thieves, rebels and the dispossessed of an empire that stretched from Canada to the Caribbean, Tuck and Kelly must endure a regime built to strip them of everything they are, and hold on to the one thing the Crown cannot take from them. Spanning five decades of the nineteenth century and woven with period newspaper reports and the voices of the colonial record, Van Diemen's Land is a sweeping, richly researched and unflinching novel. It exposes a legal system that punished poverty as harshly as crime, a society terrified of desire, and the human cost of a penal experiment that treated the soul as something to be broken and remade. It is also a story of endurance, loyalty and quiet defiance, and a stark reminder that the effort to erase identity, from colonial prisons, to residential schools, to today's struggles over gay and transgender rights, is never only history. For readers of Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish, Kate Grenville's The Secret River and Sarah Waters's Affinity.