Marion Campbell’s Prowler is a sly, fractured Australian novel about performance, desire and memory.

It moves through notebooks, voices, theatrical fragments and shifting identities. It has the texture of something half-confessed, half-staged — a novel interested not just in what happened, but in who gets to narrate it, who is watching, and what forms of attention become predatory.

Campbell is too formally restless to be neatly domestic, too psychologically exact to be merely experimental. Prowler belongs to that late-90s pocket of Australian fiction where feminist writing, postmodern structure, bodily unease and performance theory start rubbing against each other in interesting ways. A good one for readers who like fiction with notebooks inside it, masks that slip, women who refuse smooth legibility, and prose that knows the theatre of the self is never innocent.

1999 Fremantle Arts Centre Press paperback. Good copy with light cover wear and corner creasing.