1ST EDITION, 1ST PRINT, Book as new, unread, FINE condition. SIGNED BY AUTHOR TO TITLE PAGE. "Set during the first Australian cricket tour of England in 1868, this magnificent début novel explores an extraordinary friendship between King Cole, one of the Aboriginal players, and Sarah Larkin, a bookish spinster living in London. Sarah s quiet routine, divided between her father's sick room and the British Library, takes on a completely new aspect when the cricketer arrives unannounced on her doorstep. ''King Cole'' (Brippoki) enlists Sarah a copyist working in the Reading Room but to him the ''Guardian of the Words of Dead Men'' to help him search for an elusive quarry: what the ancestor spirits are trying to tell him. Knowing only the world of books, Sarah resolves to delve deep into the past and her tireless research puts them on the trail of the mysterious Joseph Druce, a convicted felon and rogue adventurer transported to New South Wales nearly eighty years earlier. From Lord's cric