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The Town
The Town | Shaun Prescott
1 post | 2 read | 4 to read
“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.
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halfdesertedstreets
The Town | Shaun Prescott
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"On a Sunday morning the town seemed lost to the countryside and highways surrounding, and the people there pitiable in their inconsequence. During a lengthy drive from the country to the city, passing through the town could make the world seem larger and more unfathomable, because how did these people get here, and why did they stay."

Oof.

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