Gould's Book of Fish: Richard Flanagan (engl.) 404 S.

Once upon a time that was called 1828, before all the living things on the land and the gfishes in the seas were destroyed, there was a man named William Buelow Gould, a convict in Van Diemen's Land who fell in love with a black woman and discovered too late that to love is not safe. Silly Billy Gould, invader of Australia, liar, murderer, forger, fantasist, condemned to live in the most brutal penal colony in the British Empire, and there ordered to paint a book of fish. Once upon a time, miraculous things happened...