Title: Author: Publisher: RRP:
Year Of The Orphan Daniel Findlay Bantam $32.99
Outback Australia is like a magnet for authors and screenwriters obsessed with the post-apocalyptic genre. The desert, the dust and the isolation are a gift.
Writers have come at it from many directions. There were the subtle suggestions of death and futile hope in a false messiah in Randolf Stow’s 1962 Australian classic Tourmaline, and the in-your-face violence of a world gone mad in the Max Max films.
Historian and youth magazine editor Daniel Findlay now takes us on another journey into the bleak, dead heart of the desert continent and, in the mould of dystopian storytelling, sets his Year Of The Orphan in the Outback, hundreds of years from now.
To prepare for the book he travelled to Maralinga in South Australia, where the British conducted their nuclear testing between 1956 and 1963, approved by Australia’s then-prime minister Robert Menzies without referring the matter to Cabinet.
The desolation has become Findlay’s backdrop. A small girl races across the desert, staying ahead of a mysterious hunter she calls the Reckoner. She knows her mother and brother have been killed.
The child is headed for the only known settlement – an outpost of shelters built from old tyres and scraps, a sanctuary from the death that stalks outside while, within its walls, greed, corruption and disease flourish. It’s not a pretty picture.
Fans of dystopian stories will love this world. Perhaps Findlay will receive the credit this book deserves – with his story turned into film.
But readers should be prepared for some mental exercise. Findlay has created a language suited to a world without a proper, structured society. The child as central character uses this language in thought and conversation.
It was annoying to sit down at the end of a long day, pick up the book and then retune to follow the dystopia-speak. It will test the brain and may try patience until you are used to it. Then the rewards flow. Title: The Zero And The One Author: Ryan Ruby Publisher: Affirm Press RRP: $19.99
This dazzling debut novel has been hailed as The Talented Mr Ripley meets Brideshead Revisited. The story is a gothic twist to a classic tale of the innocent abroad, with a sting in the tale. Shy scholarship student Owen Whiting finds himself feeling out of place in Oxford, but then meets New York scholar Zachary Foedern who takes him under his wing and into a world he has only read about. From Oxford to the seedy underbelly of Berlin (where US author Ryan Ruby lives, by the way) the pair keep pushing the boundaries of convention and morality until Zach proposes the ultimate transgression: a suicide pact. What could go wrong? Well, plenty as it happens. Owen is left to pick up the pieces, but the story isn’t over …