The Swan Book by Alexis Wright

$2.00

The Swan Book


Publisher's Summary

The new novel by Alexis Wright, whose previous novel, Carpentaria, won the Miles Franklin Award and four other major prizes including the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year Award.

The Swan Book is set in the future, with Aboriginals still living under the Intervention in the north, in an environment fundamentally altered by climate change. It follows the life of a mute teenager called Oblivia, the victim of gang rape by petrol-sniffing youths, from the displaced community where she lives in a hulk, in a swamp filled with rusting boats and thousands of black swans driven from other parts of the country, to her marriage to Warren Finch, the first Aboriginal president of Australia, and her elevation to the position of first lady, confined to a tower in a flooded and lawless southern city.

The Swan Book has all the qualities which made Wright's previous novel, Carpentaria, a prize-winning best seller. It offers an intimate awareness of the realities facing Aboriginal people; the wild energy and humour in her writing finds hope in the bleakest situations; and the remarkable combination of storytelling elements drawn from myth and legend and fairy tale.

Customer Reviews

1-5 of 2 reviews

  • Jenny T.

    I think I have just finished The Great Australian Novel. Impossible to categorize, assign it to a genre. What a roller coaster of a reading experience! I am blown away,. It’s intellectually, morally and politically challenging. Beautiful, ugly, poetic, crazily humorous borrowing from myriad sources, cultures, philosophies, traditions, unceasingly surprising. delightful, worrying, sad, shocking, funny. A tour de force.

    May 15, 2021
  • Julia

    This was a beautiful future fiction story that rally touched on happenings of today. It felt real. It felt lived. Highly recommended. Will have to listen to it again!

    July 26, 2021

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