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Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
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English
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THE ISLAND WILL SINK

Briohny Doyle

In a not-too-distant future perpetually on the brink of collapse, catastrophe is our most popular entertainment.

The energy crisis has come and gone. EcoLaw is enforced by insidious cartoon panda bears and their armies of viral-marketing children. The world watches as Pitcairn Island sinks into the Pacific, wondering if this, finally, will be the end of everything. Amongst it all, Max Galleon, anxious family man and blockbuster auteur, lives a life that he cannot remember.

What happens when you can outsource your memories—and even edit them?
When death can be reversed through digitisation, what is the point of living?
If the lines between real and unreal are fully blurred, can you really trust anyone, even yourself?

Briohny Doyle is a Melbourne-based writer and academic. Her debut novel, The Island Will Sink, was the first book published by Brow Books to critical acclaim in 2016. Her first book of non-fiction Adult Fantasy is out through Scribe in 2017. Briohny's work has appeared in publications like The Lifted Brow, The Age, Overland, Going Down Swinging and Meanjin, among others, and she has performed her work at the Sydney Festival and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.
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Published 2016-08-01 by Brow Books

Comments

“The Island Will Sink is not ‘just' a novel. It is the most assured and innovative debut I have read in a long time, one that has me excited about the political possibilities of postmodern fiction.”

“The Island Will Sink is a deep and demanding read. Doyle postulates a world in which climate change has hastened social change and political control and exacerbated the gap between the haves and have-nots, but one in which society has ultimately adapted to climatic deprivations.”

“Science fiction fans will spot echoes of J. G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick in the narrative and quirky incidental moments (Max's socks have an inbuilt compass and his house changes its settings when he enters). The Island Will Sink is groundbreaking enough to hope it might lead to greater interest in publishing Australian science fiction.”

“Doyle can do humour, and has an engaging voice. The prose in science fiction may have to be information-rich, strenuously expository in its world-building, but Doyle never gets waylaid: she can find the poetry in the new world... and the characters never seem as if they are overborne by the action or the conceptual framework.”