Purgatory

by Ian Townsend

At summertime in Purgatory, the stench of bodies is thick. Beat cops and junkies, technocrats and experimental treatments.

When there is no cure for a person, you make a new person and cure them.

“In Ian Townsend’s Purgatory the matter-of-factness of his writing is so ingenious and handy and he is such a great poker-faced magician with narrative that the effect is both riveting and sublime.” –Dennis Cooper

141 pages, Paperback

Published October 20, 2022

About the author

Ian Townsend is a journalist and radio documentary maker who worked for many years with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio national network. He has won numerous awards for journalism, including four national Eureka Prizes for science and medical journalism and an Australian Human Rights Award. His first novel, Affection, based on the 1900 outbreak of plague in Townsville, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, the Colin Roderick Award, the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, the National Year of Reading, and was long-listed for the Dublin IMPAC award. His second novel, The Devil’s Eye, based on the 1899 Bathurst Bay cyclone, was long listed for the Miles Franklin Award. His latest book, Line of Fire, is non-fiction, combining family history with military history and geology to tell the story of the civilian and military disaster that befell Rabaul at the start of the Pacific War.