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“A bizarre novel—a séance for Kafka, Walser and Calvino—that tackles the ever-disappearing boundaries between youth and aging, between music and silence, the past and present. In a spry and lonely voice, Shaun Prescott has written an ominous work of absurdity.” —Catherine Lacey, author of Nobody Is Ever Missing and The Answers “Mind-bending, often hilarious, sometimes heart-wrenchingly sad, The Town is one of the most original and exhilarating Australian novels I’ve read.” —Wayne Macauley, author of Some Tests, Demons, The Cook, Caravan Story, and Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe “The Town is understated but compelling; the narrator’s deadpan voice recalls the lone existentialist figures of Sartre’s Nausea and Camus’ The Outsider, but contrasts this with a dream logic reminiscent of Twin Peaks. This is hypnotic literary fiction for readers who make as much meaning from a McDonald’s car park as the Sydney Harbour Bridge.” —Sarah Farquharson, Books+Publishing _______ Community radio host Ciara receives dozens of unmarked cassette recordings every week and broadcasts them to a listenership of none. Ex-musician Tom drives an impractical bus that no one ever boards. Publican Jenny runs a hotel that has no patrons. Rick wanders the aisles of the Woolworths every day in an attempt to blunt the disappointment of adulthood. In a town of innumerable petrol stations, labyrinthine cul-de-sacs, competing shopping plazas, and ubiquitous drive-thru franchises, where are these people likely to find the truth about their collective past – and can they do so before the town completely disappears? Shaun Prescott’s debut novel The Town follows an unnamed narrator’s efforts to complete a book about disappeared towns in the Central West of New South Wales. Set in a yet-to-disappear town in the region—a town believed by its inhabitants to have no history at all—the novel traces its characters’ attempts to carve their own identities in a place that is both unyielding and teetering on the edge of oblivion. With this long-awaited and utterly unique novel, Shaun Prescott announces himself as a compelling new literary voice. The Town is magnetic, revealing the true depth of Australia: the good, the bad, and the captivatingly ugly.