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

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Having a child was difficult, because being an adult is difficult. Life becoming more difficult is what adulthood is about, Rick supposed, and adulthood is about meaning and purpose and noble struggle.

In books and songs people gather and drink for reasons, and their lives bull-rush towards moments of importance. In these books and songs, meaningless is depicted too deliberately, and often hinted to have an origin or logic. The people in the town lived as if they would never die, but they were not heroic or foolish like in books and songs. They were only there. They seemed to understand better than anyone else that they were only there.

Why did people continue living when this much pain was possible?

The sadness had not been a phenomenon that could tire anybody. That sadness, and its manner of revealing the limits of their control over the passage of time, had not been a sensation of which anyone in the room had been prepared to let go. The sadness had liberated them, rendering them innocent. There had been nothing they could do, and in some vague way they’d all been victims of something far beyond their ability to fight. It had made them want to live more, and that seemed naive now to Tom.

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