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	Fritz Agency Christian Dittus
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English
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Fiction & Related items

IN MOONLAND

Miles Allinson

In present-day Melbourne, a man attempts to piece together the mystery of his father's apparent suicide as his young family slowly implodes. At the ashram of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, in 1976, a man searching for salvation must confront his capacity for violence and darkness. And in a not-too-distant future, a woman with a life-altering decision to make travels through a climate-ravaged landscape to visit her estranged father.

In Moonland is a portrait of three generations, each grappling with their own mortality. Spanning the wild idealism of the 70s through to the fragile hope of the future, it is a novel about the struggle for transcendence and the reverberating effects of family bonds. This long-awaited second outing from Miles Allinson, the multi-award-winning author of Fever of Animals, will affirm his reputation as one of Australia's most interesting contemporary fiction writers, and urge us to see our own political and environmental reality in a new light.

Miles Allinson is a writer and an artist, and the author of the multi award-winning novel Fever of Animals.

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Book Published 2021-08-01 by Scribe Publications

Comments

"Wild, tender, fatalistically hilarious, and utterly enthralling. Allinson's complex insight and love for the people of this novel renders them as real as difficult kin and just as inescapable." -- Josephine Rowe, author of Here Until August "In Moonland contains everything I want from a novel. It's heart-breaking, funny, ruthless, and in the final section takes an enormous risk that works so perfectly that any other conclusion seems impossible. I love a finely turned sentence, and this book is awash with them." -- Robert Gott, author of The Orchard Murders "A thrilling novel about filial obedience, yearning, and failing that shows three wildly different journeys, exposing the battered and bulging heart that propels each. Like the best, it has me wondering how my own heart is propelled." -- Tim Rogers "In Moonland is not only beautifully and fluently written, but paced with expertise and subtlety [Miles Allinson has] the mark of an empathetic person capable of piercing artistic insight [and] In Moonland polishes this insight to jewel-like quality, and lingers, beautifully, after its plot has passed away." -- Vanessa Francesca, ArtsHub, starred review "This is a terrific novel about fatherhood, mortality, the unreliability of family stories and the fractured nature of reality." -- ANZ Litlovers "[S]tunning A novel in parts, traversing three generations and multiple viewpoints, In Moonland is a meditation on family, emotional inheritance, memory and belief. It's also about the power of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and where we come from: how, rather than reflecting an objective truth, they can shape, trap and free us. And while its ideas and structure are complex, Allinson's prose reads with the ease of a knife through warm butter, at times echoing the crisp, wry vulnerability of Helen Garner." -- Jo Case, Indaily "A novel that plumbs the vicissitudes of what we call family and what we call love It is the work of a novelist more in touch with the potential of the form than I have seen in a long time. For this reason, it achieves something that might be called artistic: it reads as an intervention into our times, not as a symptom of it. -- Jeremy George, Readings

"The emotional texture is compelling and ultimately quite moving. Allinson's prose throughout is alert, nuanced and capable of great variety. It's a formally ambitious novel, but perhaps its boldest move lies in its rejection of closure with each new section we learn more, but feel less certain It's Allinson's ability to capture the disappointments of children and the failure of parents without lazy generational summarising that gives In Moonland its diffuse, but lingering, power." -- Sydney Morning Herald "Beautifully told and heart rending in its accumulation of losses that can never be retrieved and dreams that can never be realised." -- The Herald Sun "While the novel indulges in our fascination with cults, the relationships between the characters are the main drivers of the story. Each character is a seeker in their own right, and if they aren't tapping into the mystical they are trying to unlock generational trauma. For all that, Allinson's new novel has more in common with work by writers like Peter Carey rather than Tim Winton. It's taut, unsentimental, thought-provoking, sad, and at times wild and gorgeous." -- The Guardian

"Anxious, elegiac, dreamlike It's really about freedom, about characters searching for something to believe in before they jettison the rest. It reads like a requiem for family, planet, hope for the future bittersweet and played for laughs, last drinks after the funeral The lesson of this book about freedom might be that self-sufficiency doesn't exist that freedom is other people." Read more...

Winner, 2022 Age Book of the Year Award for fiction

"[A]n ambitious and gripping story of parenthood, utopias and environmental collapse In Moonland is an astounding book that feels so epic in scope for a novel that is only 240-odd pages long. Fans of Allinson's first book have much to look forward to with his second, a skilful and existential examination of humanity in the Anthropocene."

"A joy to read, with its relaxed authority of tone, its complex emotional depths, and its curious, daring beauty." Helen Garner