Book launch: The Magpie Wing by Max Easton (featuring live bands)
Described by The Guardian as an ‘original, exceptional novel’, Max Easton’s The Magpie Wing will be launched at Pratten Park Bowling Club by author Briohny Doyle, followed by live music from bands Del Lumanta and Witness K.
Sunday 12 December, 4:00 pm – 9:00 pm AEDT
Pratten Park Bowling Club
42 Arthur Street
Ashfield, NSW 2131
Event schedule:
- 4pm: Doors open
- 5pm: Book launch
- 6.30pm: Live bands
Copies of The Magpie Wing will be available for purchase on the night, with book signings available. Food and drink will also be available for purchase from the venue.
About the book
Helen, Walt and Duncan are looking for ways to entertain themselves in the sprawl of Sydney’s western suburbs. Walt, scrappy and idealistic, wants to prove a point and turns to petty vandalism. His friend Duncan is commited to his fledgling football career, and seeks out sexual encounters in unfamiliar houses. Walt’s sister Helen, in search of something larger than herself, is forced by scandal to leave the family home. As they move into adulthood they gravitate to the dingy glamour of the inner-city suburbs, looking to escape their families’ complicated histories, and to find new identities, artistic, sexual and political. The Magpie Wing is set on football fields, in sharehouses, at punk gigs, and in dilapidated and gentrifying pubs. Max Easton’s debut novel moves from the nineties to the present, and between the suburbs and the inner city, exploring how communities that appear worlds apart – underground music scenes, rugby league clubs, communist splinter groups – often share unexpected roots.
The Magpie Wing was published by Giramondo in September 2021. Order a copy.
About Max Easton
Max Easton is a writer from south-west Sydney whose work has appeared in Sydney Review of Books, Meanjin, Science for the People, The Lifted Brow and Mess+Noise. He is the creator of the underground music podcast Barely Human, and has played in a number of Sydney punk bands including BB & The Blips, The Baby, Basic Human and Romance. He is a former research scientist and rugby league player, once appearing in an under-seventeens development squad for the Western Suburbs Magpies. The Magpie Wing is his first novel.
About Briohny Doyle
Briohny Doyle’s latest novel, Echolalia is out now through PRH Vintage. Her previous books include Adult Fantasy (Scribe 2017) and The Island Will Sink (Brow Books 2016) Briohny’s criticism, short fiction and poetry have appeared in The Sunday Times, The Monthly, The Age, Overland, Going Down Swinging, and Meanjin. She has performed her work at the Sydney Festival and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Briohny was a 2017 Endeavour post doctoral fellow at Yale University and the University of California Santa Cruz. She is a 2020 Fulbright Scholar. She is a lecturer in Writing, Literature, and Culture at Deakin University.
About Del Lumanta
Performing something new in a live setting. Listen to the 2021 release Sunken Places.
About Witness K
The four-piece Witness K take their name from the whistleblower former officer of the Australian federal security apparatus, who revealed the Australian government’s bugging of Timor-Leste’s offices during lucrative maritime border negotiations. They are currently finishing an album for ever/never records due in 2022.
