In Moonland

‘A parent’s love for a child, you probably know this yourself, it’s pretty bottomless. It goes down into the guts of the world. But a child’s love for a parent is different. It goes up. It’s more ethereal. It’s not quite present on the earth.’

In present-day Melbourne, an unnamed narrator attempts to piece together the mystery of his father’s apparent suicide, as his young family slowly implodes. At the ashram of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, in 1974, a man searching for salvation must confront his own violence and darkness. And in a not-too-distant future, a woman with a life-altering decision to make travels through a climate-ravaged landscape to visit her estranged father.

In Moonland is a portrait of three generations, each grappling with their own mortality. Spanning the wild idealism of the 70s through to the fragile hope of the future, it is a novel about the reverberating effects of family bonds, whether they are weak, strong, or severed. This long-awaited second outing from Miles Allinson, the multi-award-winning author of Fever of Animals, will cement his reputation as one of Australia’s most important contemporary fiction writers, and urge us to see our own political and environmental reality in a new light.