Praiseworthy

Description

In a small Aboriginal town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors, Cause Man Steel is chasing a mad vision: to futureproof his people against the climate crisis and to secure their economic independence via a nation-wide feral donkey transport scheme. Exhausted by her husband’s madness, Dance Steel, the moth-er in constant motion, takes solace in butterflies and would like to repatriate her mixed-race family to China. Meanwhile the suicide of Aboriginal Sovereignty, their eldest, plunges Praiseworthy into a frenzy of mourning and a desperate search for his remains. This is a novel which pushes allegory and language to its limits, a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a sharp satire for the end of days, all told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned.

‘I’m awed by the range, experiment and political intelligence of Alexis Wright’s work. She is vital on the subject of land and people.’ Robert Macfarlane, New York Times Book Review