Gail Jones's fourth novel invokes Australia's "stolen generation" - the many thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children wrested from their families for decades until the 1960s in the name of forcible assimilation. This historical injustice was the subject of a national inquiry in 1997, and the following year an annual National Sorry Day (sometimes called a Day of Healing for All Australians) was instituted - albeit without the blessing of the prime minister, John Howard.

Though the novel is informed by this recent history, Jones's approach to it is oblique. Set in Western Australia in the 1930s and 40s, Sorry is narrated by Perdita Keene, the daughter of English immigrants, looking back to her early childhood before and during the second world war. Her father, Nicholas, carrying shrapnel in his back from the previous war, was an embittered anthropologist stationed on a scrubland cattle station to do field work in aid of "governance of the natives", while her mother, Stella, sought ever more crazed refuge in Shakespeare.

Perdita's preferred family are Billy, a deaf-mute boy with "upstanding ginger hair and stippled greenish skin", and Mary, a literate Aboriginal ("half-caste") teenager drafted in from a convent to care for her during Stella's bouts at a lunatic asylum. When Nicholas is stabbed to death, and Mary confesses and is taken away, Perdita develops a hole in her memory and a stutter whose eventual cure lies in remembering the true circumstances of her father's killing.

While Mary's traumatic history is gradually revealed, the themes of separation and trauma, the haunting of memory and forgetting, language and speechlessness, are explored at one remove, through the parallel history of Perdita. Her narrative shifts from first to third person as she trawls her past, recovering her fluency with the help of the Russian Dr Oblov, and wondering "why it was she actually forgot. And why she must now remember her forgetting."

Her emotionally distant family, sure of its own superiority, is implicitly contrasted with the warmth of the Aboriginal communities from which children are stolen. It is from her Aboriginal wet nurse that Perdita learns "what it is like to lie against a breast, to sense skin as a gift, to feel the throb of a low pulse at the base of the neck, to listen, in intimate and sweet propinquity, to air entering and leaving a resting body". Her stuttering, when words would "roll in my head, like mist, like water, then emerge blurted and plosive, like something unstoppered", is partly about the loss of her wet nurse's language.

The injustice of Mary's imprisonment suggests - perhaps too explicitly - the metaphorical freight that the story is intended to bear. Visiting Mary, Perdita "carried the burden of such vast wrongdoing ... But although it was offered, there was no atonement. There was no reparation ... She should have said 'sorry'." Her guilt contrasts with the complacency of Perdita's mother, who withholds the testimony that would free Mary on the grounds that "What's done cannot be undone."

Jones's writing can be fluid and memorable, though the influence of Toni Morrison is pervasive from the opening page ("This is a story that can only be told in a whisper"). The persistent quotation of chunks of Shakespeare, alongside allusions to Heart of Darkness and Rebecca, proves an irritating device.

Just as Perdita's story is punctuated by turning points in the war, so her memory loss is counterpointed by gaps in official history, such as the Japanese bombardment of Dutch refugee ships in Broome in 1942 - another atrocity that people elected to forget.