Nation

Nation is a novel by Terry Pratchett, published in the United Kingdom on 11 September 2008 and in the United States in October 2009. It was his first novel outside the Discworld series since Johnny and the Bomb (1996). The story is set in an alternative history of our world in the 1860s, shortly after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. A Russian influenza pandemic has just killed the British king and his next 137 heirs. Pratchett wrote it with evident enthusiasm, ahead of a planned conclusion to his Tiffany Aching series, and later said it was the best book he had written or would write.

Apart from its opening chapter, the action takes place on an island in the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean, a fictionalised South Pacific, known to its indigenous people as the Nation. Its two protagonists are Ermintrude, a thirteen-year-old daughter of the governor of England's oceanic territories, and Mau, a young native who returns home after completing his coming-of-age rite to find his people wiped out by a tsunami. Together they must survive, learn each other's language and customs, and rebuild a community.

The novel explores the interplay between tradition and knowledge, and between faith and questioning. It was well received and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Young Adult Literature and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, and it was named a Michael L. Printz Honor Book. Years later it was adapted for the stage by the Royal National Theatre.