Morgan Nunan

In keeping with his successful début fiction, Shaun Prescott’s Bon and Lesley is set in a declining regional Australian town filled with oddball characters and plagued by otherworldly phenomena. The Town (2017) was published in seven countries and garnered apt comparison to, among others, Franz Kafka and László Krasznahorkai, as well as Australian writers Gerald Murnane and Wayne Macauley. Like these influences, Prescott’s work eludes definitive categorisation, though his second novel maintains distinctly ontological and surrealist emphases.

On the surface, Scott McCulloch’s début novel, Basin, takes place in a brutal and degenerated landscape; the edge of a former empire in a state of violent flux. Rebels, separatists, terrorists, paramilitary groups, and the remnants of imperial forces clash over borders and interzones in the wake of the ‘Collapse’, an undefined geopolitical and ecological disaster. Print and broadcast media warn of inter-ethnic conflict and Rebel advances. Bazaars, brothels, and a chain of Poseidon Hotels all operate amid industrial waste and military checkpoints, servicing the region’s fishermen, soldiers, smugglers, and drifters. There is a multiplicity of language and religion (Abrahamic denominations mingle with archaic, pagan beliefs). Alcohol consumption and illicit drug use are rife. The climate is oppressively humid.