Josephine Rowe’s “Little World” is a strange little book about the corpse of a strange little saint.

The body arrives in the Australian desert sometime after World War II, a bequest sent to a solitary man named Orrin Bird by an old friend, a guilt-stricken expatriate Norwegian who had held onto the saint’s remains for a quarter-century.

The girl has no known name and looks to be about 11, although the voice of her consciousness — which is still attached, somehow, to her incorruptible body — soon informs us that she is, in fact, 14. Her sainthood is in doubt. On the one hand, her flesh refuses to decompose, and miracles have been attributed to her purified remains. On the other, she is insistent that she is no saint and, furthermore, that the innocence ascribed to her in death is an offense after the violence that killed her. If she had to lose her life to that horror — which Rowe never describes in detail, hauntingly leaving it to the imagination — it is unjust, the saint thinks, that her worshippers should be given reason to look right past it.

Also, no one seems particularly eager to alert the Vatican to her existence. She is something like a patron saint for those stuck in limbo, a job for which she is uniquely well-suited. Even in death, she exists between states: not quite conscious, not quite holy, never settled.

“Little World” is a chronicle of the unmoored lives touched by this small, sanctified body and the funny, observant, determinedly unsanctified spirit tied to it. At just more than 100 pages, it’s the kind of concise, precisely sketched novel that you can read in one sitting, coming away with a sense of having been briefly but profoundly transported.

The story it tells is touched by many darknesses: the traumas of colonialism; the grief of having been graced by a love that others might see as taboo; the shadow of the Holocaust; the bewildering early days of the COVID pandemic. And yet it is light, a sort of elevating, spiritual dance in language.

This all makes it a book fit for the moment. Life will always be hard, Rowe and her saint suggest; people will always be cruel; loss and destruction will continue to be guiding principles of the world. But that world will remain a wonder all the same, full of what one character who arrives late in the story calls “dog beauty”: “certain qualities all but lost on human senses and aesthetics.”

Rowe — an Australian writer whose previous novels and story collections have made her a critical darling in her home country — is a challenging writer. A lover of language that is somehow simultaneously rich and sparse, she wants readers to work for the conclusions they draw. “What is hers and what is not?” the saint’s spirit wonders. “Sunlight welling like warm oil in the open palm of an outflung hand, the day’s sun-baked groundheat soaking up into the knuckles, pressed like that between earth and sky, held on the luscious cusp of sleep.”

There are times when the obscurity of this kind of imagery frustrates; it can seem too caught up in its own abstruse loveliness to really mean anything. But more frequently, it brings an unexpected and revelatory sharpness to the unfamiliar world Rowe describes.

Orrin Bird, the first of the saint’s Australian guardians, remembers a wartime Japanese airstrike: “Roebuck Bay skeined with burning oil, and flying boats blazing down into it, laden with Dutch refugees bound for sanctuary.” The shock of the attack, and the alarming beauty of its aftermath — “skeined” is such a distinctive verb, as if the flames were woven by some conscious force beyond human understanding — gives way to the melancholy of all those doomed, nameless refugees, struck down just as they appeared to reach safety. The book is made up of such sentences, short and dense, full of emotion but also set at a slight perceptive remove.

It can be easy, when you have lived through terrible things, to retreat into a kind of unfeeling lull. That is Bird’s choice; after a career spent helping colonial powers exploit the resources of less-powerful nations, he is living alone with his guilt. That is originally the choice, too, of Mathilde, a traumatized refugee from the war who inherits the saint’s body. She discovers it on a long, aimless road trip across the Australian desert with two younger women whom she may or may not despise. Thirty-six years old and adrift, she thinks of herself as “the kind of woman who allows things to happen to her, good or bad.”

The saint changes that. When Mathilde discovers her, she is struck by wonder, then by care. She “brings her face close to the child’s and blows to lift the grit from the dark lashes, the way she once saw somebody do with a toddler at the beach.” She is, suddenly, no longer someone to whom things just happen. She is someone who can feel, and act on, tenderness.

Maybe that’s part of what holiness looks like, in a modern world that often encourages alienation: a prompting to connect, to feel, to be comforted by the fact that there are still many mysteries to reality. “We’ve begun to have eyes for it,” that one character thinks of the “dog beauty” she identifies: “or so we like to think.”

Talya Zax is an editor at the Forward.