The wildly inventive Flanagan (screenwriter for the movie Australia) weaves the facts of the life of the Victorian governor of Tasmania and Arctic explorer, Sir John Franklin and the story of a young Aborigine girl into a series of elegantly interlaced stories of ambition, desire and colonialism that take you from provincial Hobart to the Canadian Arctic and Charles Dicken's London, shattered by the loss of the 129 members of the Franklin Expedition.  (AUS221, $14.00)