Roman Polanski’s Chinatown was about the politics of water in pre-war Los Angeles, then a small city in a large desert. I was reminded of this when reading Cover the Bones (Wildlife, 512 pp, £20) by Chris Hammer, whose scary outback thriller Scrublands was televised last year. In the 1920s, a consortium of Australian families, calling themselves the Seven, create Yuwonderie, a lush oasis in the parched outback that relies on a system of irrigation canals.
Treating the town like a demesne, Mark Sanderson said that ‘a tide of blood
