Praiseworthy

In a small Aboriginal town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors, Cause Man Steel is chasing a mad vision: to futureproof his people against the climate crisis and to secure their economic independence via a nation-wide feral donkey transport scheme. Exhausted by her husband's madness, Dance Steel, the moth-er in constant motion, takes solace in butterflies and would like to repatriate her mixed-race family to China. Meanwhile the suicide of Aboriginal Sovereignty, their eldest, plunges Praiseworthy into a frenzy of mourning and a desperate search for his remains. This is a novel which pushes allegory and language to its limits, a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a sharp satire for the end of days, all told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned.