When a spreading fire in the mountains stops his train, Bon looks out the window and does what he’s always imagined he might – he gets off the train, and steps out of his life. In the desolate regional town of Newnes, he falls into the company of Steven and Jack Grady, two brothers, one garrulous, the other all but silent, both drawn like moths to the chaos of the coming days. When Lesley – an enigmatic fellow escapee from the city – arrives, they coalesce into a makeshift family unit, bound by a deep and strange attachment. They fall into a routine fuelled by cheap alcohol and fast food, reading shopping catalogues and seeking hidden paths in the forest, while trying to make sense of the darkness that seems to be encroaching on their lives.
Depicting a world of peculiar anarchies and regulations, of secret portals that lurk beneath the country’s failing design, Bon and Lesley is an urgent, surreal dispatch that asks where care persists in a country intimately familiar with catastrophe. - Giramondo Publishing
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.- Books+Publishing
Bon and Lesley has shown that [Prescott] had more left to uncover in Australia’s regions. It holds complex characters and searing insights, using the atmosphere and language he established in The Town to break into new, rich territory.- Meanjin
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