Shaun Prescott

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-sac streets, two 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.

The Town

A new edition of Shaun Prescott’s internationally acclaimed debut novel, first published in 2017. Accompanies Prescott’s follow-up, Bon and Lesley, released by Giramondo in September 2022. It is a town of dwindling fortunes: of petrol stations and fast-food outlets, shopping centres and cul-de-sacs, radio stations with no listeners, buses empty of passengers — a town believed by its inhabitants to have no history of its own. When a young writer arrives to research a book about disappearing towns in regional New South Wales, he falls into the futile rhythms of the place. Then, an outbreak of mysterious holes starts to appear — a mysterious, growing oblivion that threatens to erase the town’s already marginal existence. Shaun Prescott’s unsettling, quietly luminous debut has drawn comparisons to Kafka and Calvino, Murnane and Macauley. At once deadpan and hypnotic, realist and surreal, it explores the disquiet that lurks at the heart of Australia’s buried history, and considers what kind of identity can be found in a place on the verge of becoming nowhere. Praise for The Town: 'This novel signals its author as someone who understands what literature is for. It is one of the strongest and strangest contemporary Australian novels I’ve seen.' — Sydney Morning Herald 'This is a book that creeps up on the reader: all of a sudden you’re swept away by, even bound to, this thing that’s so mournful, intense and unsettling. It will stay with me.' — Lisa McInerney 'A powerfully doomy debut…Intelligently alive to its own metaphorical possibilities, leaving behind a powerful vision of the world ending, not with a bang, but a whimper.' — The Guardian 'One of those rare books that bothers your thinking by making you feel uncomfortable without necessarily knowing why or how. The aftermath is a kind of free-fall. It’s a remarkable achievement.' — The Australian

A new edition of Shaun Prescott's internationally acclaimed debut novel, first published in 2017. Accompanies Prescott's follow-up, Bon and Lesley, released by Giramondo in September 2022. It is a town of dwindling fortunes: of petrol stations and fast-food outlets, shopping centres and cul-de-sacs, radio stations with no listeners, buses empty of passengers -- a town believed by its inhabitants to have no history of its own. When a young writer arrives to research a book about disappearing towns in regional New South Wales, he falls into the futile rhythms of the place. Then, an outbreak of mysterious holes starts to appear -- a mysterious, growing oblivion that threatens to erase the town's already marginal existence. Shaun Prescott's unsettling, quietly luminous debut has drawn comparisons to Kafka and Calvino, Murnane and Macauley. At once deadpan and hypnotic, realist and surreal, it explores the disquiet that lurks at the heart of Australia's buried history, and considers what kind of identity can be found in a place on the verge of becoming nowhere. Praise for The Town: 'This novel signals its author as someone who understands what literature is for. It is one of the strongest and strangest contemporary Australian novels I've seen.' -- Sydney Morning Herald 'This is a book that creeps up on the reader: all of a sudden you're swept away by, even bound to, this thing that's so mournful, intense and unsettling. It will stay with me.' -- Lisa McInerney 'A powerfully doomy debut...Intelligently alive to its own metaphorical possibilities, leaving behind a powerful vision of the world ending, not with a bang, but a whimper.' -- The Guardian 'One of those rare books that bothers your thinking by making you feel uncomfortable without necessarily knowing why or how. The aftermath is a kind of free-fall. It's a remarkable achievement.' -- The Australian

When a spreading fire in the mountains stops his train just outside an almost abandoned town, Bon looks out the window and does what he's always imagined he might - he steps out of his life without looking back. There, he falls into the company of two young brothers, Steven and Jack Grady, both drawn like moths to the chaos of the coming days, and Lesley, an enigmatic fellow escapee from the city. Together they coalesce into a makeshift family unit, fuelled by cheap liquor and fried food, and bound by a deep and incomprehensible love. Taking in a world of peculiar anarchies and regulations, of secret roads and portals that lurk beneath the country's failing design, Bon and Lesley is an urgent, surreal dispatch from a country intimately familiar with catastrophe. Praise for The Town: 'Prescott seeks the universal in a meticulous paraphrase of the here and now, and finds the dislocation hiding in locality to show us just how lost we really may be.' - Jonathan Lethem 'There's a deceptive lightness to Prescott's style, so this is a book that creeps up on the reader: all of a sudden you're swept away by, even bound to, this thing that's so mournful, intense and unsettling. It will stay with me.' - Lisa McInerney 'A bizarre novel - a seance for Kafka, Walser and Calvino. Shaun Prescott has written an ominous work of absurdity.' - Catherine Lacey

Bon and Lesley

When a spreading fire in the mountains stops his train just outside an almost abandoned town, Bon looks out the window and does what he’s always imagined he might – he steps out of his life without looking back. There, he falls into the company of two young brothers, Steven and Jack Grady, both drawn like moths to the chaos of the coming days, and Lesley, an enigmatic fellow escapee from the city. Together they coalesce into a makeshift family unit, fuelled by cheap liquor and fried food, and bound by a deep and incomprehensible love. Taking in a world of peculiar anarchies and regulations, of secret roads and portals that lurk beneath the country’s failing design, Bon and Lesley is an urgent, surreal dispatch from a country intimately familiar with catastrophe. Praise for The Town: ‘Prescott seeks the universal in a meticulous paraphrase of the here and now, and finds the dislocation hiding in locality to show us just how lost we really may be.’ – Jonathan Lethem ‘There’s a deceptive lightness to Prescott’s style, so this is a book that creeps up on the reader: all of a sudden you’re swept away by, even bound to, this thing that’s so mournful, intense and unsettling. It will stay with me.’ – Lisa McInerney ‘A bizarre novel – a seance for Kafka, Walser and Calvino. Shaun Prescott has written an ominous work of absurdity.’ – Catherine Lacey

"A powerfully doomy debut" (The Guardian), Shaun Prescott’s The Town is a novel of a rural Australian community besieged by modern day anxieties and threatened by a supernatural force seeking to consume the dying town. This is Australia, an unnamed, dead-end town in the heart of the outback—a desolate place of gas stations, fast-food franchises, and labyrinthine streets: flat and nearly abandoned. When a young writer arrives to research just such depressing middles-of-nowhere as they are choked into oblivion, he finds something more sinister than economic depression: the ghost towns of Australia appear to be literally disappearing. An epidemic of mysterious holes is threatening his new home’s very existence, and this discovery plunges the researcher into an abyss of weirdness from which he may never escape. Dark, slippery and unsettling, Shaun Prescott’s debut resurrects the existential novel for the age of sprawl and blight, excavates a nation’s buried history of colonial genocide, and tells a love story that asks if outsiders can ever truly belong anywhere. The result is a disquieting classic that vibrates with an occult power.

A Novel

Shaun Prescott es uno de los autores revelación de la nueva literatura australiana: un relato alegórico y mordaz sobre la desaparición de los pueblos. Una novela que se desliza entre Kafka y Calvino para indagar en las consecuencias del olvido y la indiferencia. «Cuando estás en ciertos pueblos, el resto del mundo desaparece, de ahí que sea lógico que, para el resto del mundo, algunos pueblos también desaparezcan o sean una fantasía, un pueblo fantasma o un punto puramente decorativo en un mapa.» Esta novela gira en torno a uno de esos lugares anónimos y a un escritor sin nombre que acaba de mudarse allí para terminar un libro sobre las poblaciones que han perdido su razón de ser y desaparecen hasta caer en el olvido. Sus habitantes deambulan por una existencia que parece no llevarles a ningún lado: el conductor de autobús que conduce por una ruta que nadie utiliza, la chica de la radio local que trabaja en un programa que nadie escucha o el hombre que se pasea por el supermercado todo el día. La rutina extravagante de los lugareños se ve alterada el día en que la aparición de unos misteriosos agujeros amenaza la supervivencia del pueblo. Shaun Prescott ha escrito una primera novela inquietante, laberíntica, resbaladiza y divertida, que reflexiona, con una ironía melancólica, sobre la desazón y la indiferencia de una sociedad en decadencia, que da la espalda a su historia y que ha perdido la esperanza en el futuro. Críticas: «Una profunda melancolía ronda las páginas de la entrañablemente sombría novela del escritor australiano Shaun Prescott [...] Una novela interesante y provocadora, inteligentemente consciente de sus propias posibilidades metafóricas, que deja tras de sí una visión poderosa de un fin del mundo que no sucede con una explosión, sino con un suspiro.» The Guardian «Una de las novelas australianas contemporáneas más potentes y peculiares.» Kerryn Goldsworthy, Sydney Morning Herald «Un lugar en el mapa se mueve sutilmente entre [...] Calvino, Kafka y Abe, pero además invoca a algunos predecesores [...] Prescott busca lo universal en una meticulosa interpretación del aquí y del ahora, y encuentra el desarraigo escondido en la localidad, para mostrarnos lo realmente perdidos que podemos estar.» Jonathan Lethem «Una de las novelas australianas contemporáneas más potentes y peculiares.» Kerryn Goldsworthy, Sydney Morning Herald «Uno de esos libros excepcionales que te interroga y te hace sentir incómodo sin saber cómo o por qué. Lo que sigue es como una caída libre.» Ed Wright, The Australian «Un espejo alegórico que refleja los males de la ignorancia y la xenofobia, acechantes en todos los lugares y en todos los humanos, y la fragilidad de la existencia.Un retrato fascinante aunque desalentador.» Benjamin Myer, New Statesman «Uno de los mejores libros de este año.» Joseph Earp, The Brag «Si esta novela realmente comparte algo con la autoficción, es la interrogación de la naturaleza de la ficción y los medios limitados que posee para moldear nuestras vidas. Prescott consigue unir estos espacios irreconciliables con la belleza de su prosa.» Alan Murrin, The Spectator «La historia mantiene un tono sostenido e hipnótico, mientras examina los rituales inconscientes de nuestro día a día y la complejidad de nuestras relaciones con el pasado. También es tremendamente divertida.» Mandy Sayer, The Australian

Shaun Prescott

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