Praiseworthy
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
An astonishing and monumental masterpiece from the towering Australian writer Alexis Wright whose “words explode from the page” (The Monthly)
WINNER OF THE 2024 MILES FRANKLIN AWARD
WINNER OF THE 2024 STELLA PRIZE
WINNER OF THE 2024 JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE
WINNER OF THE 2023 QUEENSLAND AWARD FOR LITERARY FICTION
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD
In a small town in the north of Australia, a mysterious haze cloud heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors. A visionary on his own holy quest, Cause Man Steel seeks the perfect platinum donkey to launch an Aboriginal-owned donkey transport industry, saving Country and the world from fossil fuels. His wife, Dance, seeking solace from his madness, studies butterflies and moths and dreams of repatriating her family to China. One of their sons, named Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to end it all by walking into the sea. Their other child, Tommyhawk, wants nothing more than to be adopted by Australia’s most powerful white woman. Praiseworthy is an epic masterpiece that bends time and reality—a cry of outrage against oppression, greed, and assimilation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This freewheeling and heartbreaking masterpiece from Aboriginal Australian author Wright (Carpenteria) brims with the magic of myth and the painful realities of present-day climate change. An "ochre-coloured haze" has descended on the remote town of Praiseworthy, Australia, "claiming ultimate sovereignty of the flatlands" and portending ecological disaster. A man variously known as Widespread, Planet, and Cause Man Steel comes up with a harebrained and quixotic plan for surviving the future. Based on a dream he once had, it involves an "empire" of "super-charged donkeys that were fit for a super-charged climate." Meanwhile, Widespread's elder son, Aboriginal Sovereignty, who's distraught after having been accused of raping the underage girl he's in love with (she's only 18 months younger), considers suicide. Widespread's younger son, Tommyhawk, whom his father calls a "born fascist," hopes his brother follows through on his plan and thereby avoid a public trial that would upset Tommyhawk's desire to assimilate into white society. Rounding out the cast is Dance Steel, Widespread's wife, who's "like a haven for butterflies or moths" because she speaks "the moths' frequency, a language of millennia which she had learnt in dreams which were only ever about butterflies and moths." At once lush and relentless, Wright's looping tale combines magical realism, absurdism, and maximalism in a rich depiction of contemporary Aboriginal life. This is unforgettable.