A strange, inward Australian novel about Alan Palit, a man who is mad, incarcerated, and trying to reconstruct the events that pushed him toward hermitage and exclusion.

The setup is already doing something more warped than a conventional realist novel, built around a consciousness trying to make sense of its own derailment. Wallace-Crabbe is better known in some circles as a painter and printmaker as well as a writer, and that slight cross-disciplinary aura suits the novel. It feels like the work of someone attentive to composition, distortion, and the odd emotional charge of surfaces.

This edition isn’t rare in a collector’s sense, but it is exactly the kind of out-of-the-way Australian literary fiction that is especially for readers interested in neglected local fiction from the late 70s and 80s orbit.