Set around the strange suspended world of wartime internment in Australia, The Stencil Man follows Martin, an artist asked to make illustrations for a camp paper while living inside a half-life made from confinement.

It moves through art, memory, war, and the uneasy labour of representing events one has not directly seen: ships at sea, burned men in hospital huts, histories arriving through other people’s damaged accounts.

Disher is better known now for crime fiction, but this sits in a different register: Australian historical fiction with an eye for the texture of institutions, displacement, and ordinary human improvisation under pressure. The cover image — Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack’s Desolation, internment camp, Orange, NSW — gives the book its proper atmosphere: quiet, stripped-back, shadowed by war without becoming war-glossy. One for readers interested in Australian WWII history, internment, art under constraint, and fiction that feels like a ticking clock.

Paperback, Angus & Robertson / Imprint, Australia. First published in Imprint in Australia in 1988; this edition 1990, with this copy 1993 reprint. Light general shelf wear and handling marks to cover, mild page toning, clean internal pages.