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Bon and Lesley
The powerful second novel from the author of The Town, which Jonathan Lethem describes as moving ‘with the gentle command…of Calvino, Kafka, and Abe’.
When a spreading fire in the mountains stops his train just outside an almost abandoned town, Bon looks out the window and does what he’s always imagined he might – he steps out of his life without looking back. There, he falls into the company of two young brothers, Steven and Jack Grady, both drawn like moths to the chaos of the coming days, and Lesley, an enigmatic fellow escapee from the city. Together they coalesce into a makeshift family unit, fuelled by cheap liquor and fried food, and bound by a deep and incomprehensible love. Taking in a world of peculiar anarchies and regulations, of secret roads and portals that lurk beneath the country’s failing design, Bon and Lesley is an urgent, surreal dispatch from a country intimately familiar with catastrophe.
Empty streets, highway petrol stations and deserted shopping centres complement surreal scenes of suffocating darkness, hulking monsters and mysterious tunnels, making for a disarming yet beautiful and profound novel that locates itself in the tradition of speculative, postmodern writers from Kobo Abe to László Krasznahorkai, with a distinctly Australian sensibility recalling Gerald Murnane and Wayne Macauley.
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Praise for The Town
Prescott seeks the universal in a meticulous paraphrase of the here and now, and finds the dislocation hiding in locality to show us just how lost we really may be.
Jonathan Lethem
There’s a deceptive lightness to Prescott’s style, so this is a book that creeps up on the reader: all of a sudden you’re swept away by, even bound to, this thing that’s so mournful, intense and unsettling. It will stay with me.Lisa McInerney
A bizarre novel – a seance for Kafka, Walser and Calvino. Shaun Prescott has written an ominous work of absurdity.Catherine Lacey
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Reviews
A disarming yet beautiful and profound novel.
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