The Swan Book
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- £7.49
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fraying the edges of reality, Wright mixes a dystopian future with ancient mythology and folklore to create a book charged with razor-sharp wit, linguistic acumen, and an astoundingly vivid imagination. Climate change has wreaked havoc on Australia, creating war, famine, and dust. The eccentric Bella Donna finds Oblivia Ethylene beneath a gum tree, the victim of a horrible assault. She raises the girl in the rusted-out hulk of a warship run aground in the middle of a swamp designated as a detention camp for Aboriginal Australians, and tells Oblivia stories about the swans and ghosts that inhabit the swamp. Warren Finch, the darling of society and the first Aboriginal president of Australia, visits the camp promising rights to the people of the swamp, and forcibly takes Oblivia, who's barely in her teens, to be his wife. Wright, winner of the Miles Franklin Award and a member of the Waanyi nation of the Gulf of Carpenteria, has crafted a multilayered and magical novel firmly rooted in the issues of the present day. Told in dense prose full of evocative imagery, Wright's book deftly highlights the racial and cultural politics facing Australia's indigenous people in a story that defies genre. It is a challenging and heartbreaking story that illuminates the culture and struggles of an often overlooked people.
