Nation

Nation is a novel by the English writer Terry Pratchett, published in the United Kingdom on 11 September 2008, and the first book he wrote outside his Discworld series since 1996.

The book is set in a low fantasy version of the world in the 1860s. A tsunami sweeps across the islands, drowning the community Mau was about to join as an adult and leaving him the only person on his island, and the same wave wrecks the ship carrying Daphne, a girl from the other side of the globe, on to the shore where he lives. Mau and Daphne have no common language to begin with, and neither of them has the knowledge the other needs, so the two of them have to build a way of living from what the tide has left behind them. Pratchett wrote the novel for younger readers, and it deals with grief, invention and what a nation is, and it was named a Printz Honor Book in 2009.

Pratchett is best known for the long Discworld sequence, and he had been thinking about this book for four years before he sat down to write it.

The story is set in an alternative history rather than on another world, and the island, its customs and its loss are the whole of its subject.