Let me start with a warning. I intend to rave about this novel.

A young Arghani immigrant works desperately to make a place for himself in the West. All he wants is to be accepted and happy. Alas, the West (Australia) and its inhabitants reject him. His ambitions warp into anger.

Sounds (over)familiar? The difference in this case is that it happens during World War 1, when Gool Mahommed - mullah, camel-driver and aspiring mine worker - tries to come to terms with the gruelling Australian outback and with his attraction to a local woman who is an exile in a different sense.

The ''Battle of Broken Hill'' may be the least-known action in Australian history. On New Year's Day 1915, two Afghan cameleers armed themselves with a couple of outmoded rifles, hoisted the Turkish flag on an ice-cream cart, and opened fire on a picnic train near Broken Hill.

This incident is the dramatic high-point of Chris McCourt's account of prejudice and cultural misunderstanding. An act of terrorism? McCourt won't fix so simple and inflammatory a label to an affair that, in her telling, was provoked by jingoism, racism and persecution, and compounded by blighted hopes, unrealistic ambitions and thwarted love. How much her story is grounded in fact I can't say - in any case, it is irrelevant for the purposes of this, her first novel. Even without the Romeo and Juliet romance that drives McCourt's story along, there's no doubt that the attack had a sharp personal edge - on that day in 1915, mullah Abdullah wanted to kill sanitary inspector Brosnan ''first'' because the official had hauled him before the court for preparing halal meat.