Miles Allinson’s In Moonland moves across three generations, beginning in contemporary Melbourne with a man trying to understand his father’s apparent suicide. 

From there, the novel slips backward to 1970s India, where another man is drawn into the orbit of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s ashram, chasing transcendence and finding something much darker inside himself. It then reaches forward into a near future shaped by ecological collapse, where a woman travels through a damaged landscape toward an estranged father and a decision that cannot be made cleanly.

This is a novel about fathers, children, inherited damage, failed utopias, spiritual vanity, and the afterlife of people’s attempts to become free. Allinson is good on the particular Australian sadness of men who mistake disappearance for depth, and on the way family history becomes hard to locate, impossible not to live inside.

Formally, it sits somewhere between family novel, cult novel, speculative future, and metaphysical grief study. Very good for readers who like Australian literary fiction with a bit of dread under the floorboards.

First Scribe paperback edition, published 2021. Paperback, with some light shelf and handling wear visible to the cover and edges; internally clean and very readable.