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A Rising of the Lights
From the Booker-shortlisted author, an audacious comic lament for a world that no longer knows itself.
‘Brilliant, hilarious, eccentric and beautiful. A surfacing story unlike anything I’ve read. I need two copies of this book. One to keep on my shelf, and a sacrificial one so I can cut out paragraphs and frame them.’ Tim Minchin
‘The cure for loneliness causes loneliness. That’s the human condition.’
In a reeling world of fraudsters and hypnotists, sleep talkers and estranged twins, false alibis and second chances, Rusty Wilson is beset on all sides by mysteries. Why was his childhood decided by a throw of dice, why has his wife confessed to a lover, and why do his parents no longer wish to see him?
When Rusty loses his job to an AI system, Edwina, the mercurial friend of his youth, finds him a new role as an oracle to the young. But how can he advise anyone on what it means to be human when artificial consciousness appears within reach? If it’s all just one more con, it’s not clear who’s scamming who. Besides, should any of it matter to Rusty, when all he wants is for those he loves to love him back?
What holds a life together when everything is coming apart?
An audacious comic lament for a world that no longer knows itself, A Rising of the Lights traces Rusty’s descent – or perhaps his ascent – to the wonder of his true self.
'A wildly imaginative, deeply hilarious and surprisingly tender story of the paths life takes when you don’t take a life path. Morbid, insane, brilliant and packed with the kind of darkly funny philosophical insights that make sense of an increasingly terrifying, tech-dominated world.' Lexi Frieman, author of The Book of Ayn
‘Brilliant, hilarious, eccentric and beautiful. A surfacing story unlike anything I’ve read. I need two copies of this book. One to keep on my shelf, and a sacrificial one so I can cut out paragraphs and frame them.’ Tim Minchin
‘The cure for loneliness causes loneliness. That’s the human condition.’
In a reeling world of fraudsters and hypnotists, sleep talkers and estranged twins, false alibis and second chances, Rusty Wilson is beset on all sides by mysteries. Why was his childhood decided by a throw of dice, why has his wife confessed to a lover, and why do his parents no longer wish to see him?
When Rusty loses his job to an AI system, Edwina, the mercurial friend of his youth, finds him a new role as an oracle to the young. But how can he advise anyone on what it means to be human when artificial consciousness appears within reach? If it’s all just one more con, it’s not clear who’s scamming who. Besides, should any of it matter to Rusty, when all he wants is for those he loves to love him back?
What holds a life together when everything is coming apart?
An audacious comic lament for a world that no longer knows itself, A Rising of the Lights traces Rusty’s descent – or perhaps his ascent – to the wonder of his true self.
'A wildly imaginative, deeply hilarious and surprisingly tender story of the paths life takes when you don’t take a life path. Morbid, insane, brilliant and packed with the kind of darkly funny philosophical insights that make sense of an increasingly terrifying, tech-dominated world.' Lexi Frieman, author of The Book of Ayn
- GenresAudiobook21st Century
311 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2026
68 people are currently reading
644 people want to read
About the author
Steve Toltz
5 books1,128 followersSteve Toltz (born in 1972) is an Australian novelist.
Toltz graduated from the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, in 1994. Prior to his literary career, he lived in Montreal, Vancouver, New York, Barcelona, and Paris, variously working as a cameraman, telemarketer, security guard, private investigator, English teacher, and screenwriter.
A Fraction of the Whole, his first novel, was released in 2008 to widespread critical acclaim. It is a comic novel which tells the history of a family of Australian outcasts. The narration of the novel alternates between Jasper Dean, a philosophical, idealistic boy, who grows up throughout the novel and his father, Martin Dean, a philosopher and shut-in described at the start of the novel as "the most hated man in all of Australia". This is in contrast with Terry Dean, Jasper's uncle, whom Jasper describes as "the most beloved man in all of Australia". The novel spans the entirety of Martin's life and several years after (a range never specified in the text, but starting after World War II and ending in the early 2000s), and is set in Australia, Paris, and Thailand.
The novel has repeatedly been compared favorably to John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer Prize winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces. A Fraction of the Whole was shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize and the 2008 Guardian First Book Award.
Toltz graduated from the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, in 1994. Prior to his literary career, he lived in Montreal, Vancouver, New York, Barcelona, and Paris, variously working as a cameraman, telemarketer, security guard, private investigator, English teacher, and screenwriter.
A Fraction of the Whole, his first novel, was released in 2008 to widespread critical acclaim. It is a comic novel which tells the history of a family of Australian outcasts. The narration of the novel alternates between Jasper Dean, a philosophical, idealistic boy, who grows up throughout the novel and his father, Martin Dean, a philosopher and shut-in described at the start of the novel as "the most hated man in all of Australia". This is in contrast with Terry Dean, Jasper's uncle, whom Jasper describes as "the most beloved man in all of Australia". The novel spans the entirety of Martin's life and several years after (a range never specified in the text, but starting after World War II and ending in the early 2000s), and is set in Australia, Paris, and Thailand.
The novel has repeatedly been compared favorably to John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer Prize winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces. A Fraction of the Whole was shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize and the 2008 Guardian First Book Award.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
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April 14, 2026Steve Toltz’s new novel sacrifices its story at the altar of the gag:
There’s an old rumour that Nikolai Gogol, the author of Dead Souls, cackled in his study deep into the night as he wrote his satire of imperialist Russia. Reading Steve Toltz, I imagine something similar: the writer snorting with laughter as each epigram types itself into being.
Toltz is often described as a satirist, but he is really a comedian. In his novels, hapless characters bumble through situations beyond their control. He portrays narcissists, misanthropes and oddballs with improbable dreams and cynical worldviews. His greatest trick is filling his novels with every personality type you’d desperately avoid at a party. They are, in short, great fun.
And yet I left Toltz’s new novel, A Rising of the Lights, battered and weary. His comic style, meant to dazzle with incisive wit, settles in as the novel’s default mode. Toltz sacrifices everything – social commentary, character development, the sentimental found in the absurd – at the altar of the gag.
Readers of Toltz’s 2007 debut A Fraction of the Whole know what to expect: wisecracking dialogue, weird dysfunctional families, eccentrics galore.
A Rising of the Lights begins with Rusty Wilson suffering an abrupt mid-life crisis. His childless marriage ends after his wife leaves him for an Uber driver. He loses his HR job in a government department to an AI efficiency scheme. And his divorced octogenarian parents Gordon and Sigrid, withering away in separate aged-care facilities, suddenly restrict Rusty’s visiting rights.
Alone, and suffering from a mysterious stomach ailment (the “rising of the lights” from which the novel borrows its title), Rusty suspects he may die soon. Why bother carrying on at all?
Like the passive Istvan from David Szalay’s Booker-winning Flesh, Rusty is “devoid of ambition”: he lets life happen to him. Forces intervene – his estranged twin sister, an old school friend, his parents – to drag him through life.
When Rusty becomes the career counsellor at a private school, he bombards captive students with pseudo-interpretations of philosophers and here the novel gestures towards a fear for the future. Rusty fires off typical “Toltzian” bizarro analogies: “Society is like a memory foam … I advised them not to live a life in order to narrate it … They’d need to accept being, at all times, a spiritual infant and a corpse-in-waiting.”
This humour is really a type of linguistic slapstick. Instead of banana peels and pratfalls, Toltz’s characters trip over their deliberately clumsy and humiliating worldviews. A Rising of the Lights arrives at that strange cultural juncture when artificial intelligence has stepped over the boundaries of science fiction and become a subject of contemporary realism. By way of its premise and targets, the novel suggests that it will reckon with the AI “jobpocalypse”, Australia’s aged-care system crisis, and the fever pitch rhetoric of polycrisis. The targets are all in his line of sight.
These domains are all worthy of critique, but they’re really just the comic stages upon which his characters perform. Toltz does have a good ear for one-liners, but delivered without tonal variation, trapped in a ceaseless vortex of wits, I wished that occasionally he would put all jokes aside.
While the novel skirts over other areas worthy of serious lampooning – elements that are already embedded in the story and its time – it is Toltz’s full-scale embrace of aphoristic chatter that leaves me worn out. On every page you can hear the author’s own laughter. But the jokes come so thick and fast that there’s hardly a moment to take a breath and wonder what we’re laughing about.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/cult...
There’s an old rumour that Nikolai Gogol, the author of Dead Souls, cackled in his study deep into the night as he wrote his satire of imperialist Russia. Reading Steve Toltz, I imagine something similar: the writer snorting with laughter as each epigram types itself into being.
Toltz is often described as a satirist, but he is really a comedian. In his novels, hapless characters bumble through situations beyond their control. He portrays narcissists, misanthropes and oddballs with improbable dreams and cynical worldviews. His greatest trick is filling his novels with every personality type you’d desperately avoid at a party. They are, in short, great fun.
And yet I left Toltz’s new novel, A Rising of the Lights, battered and weary. His comic style, meant to dazzle with incisive wit, settles in as the novel’s default mode. Toltz sacrifices everything – social commentary, character development, the sentimental found in the absurd – at the altar of the gag.
Readers of Toltz’s 2007 debut A Fraction of the Whole know what to expect: wisecracking dialogue, weird dysfunctional families, eccentrics galore.
A Rising of the Lights begins with Rusty Wilson suffering an abrupt mid-life crisis. His childless marriage ends after his wife leaves him for an Uber driver. He loses his HR job in a government department to an AI efficiency scheme. And his divorced octogenarian parents Gordon and Sigrid, withering away in separate aged-care facilities, suddenly restrict Rusty’s visiting rights.
Alone, and suffering from a mysterious stomach ailment (the “rising of the lights” from which the novel borrows its title), Rusty suspects he may die soon. Why bother carrying on at all?
Like the passive Istvan from David Szalay’s Booker-winning Flesh, Rusty is “devoid of ambition”: he lets life happen to him. Forces intervene – his estranged twin sister, an old school friend, his parents – to drag him through life.
When Rusty becomes the career counsellor at a private school, he bombards captive students with pseudo-interpretations of philosophers and here the novel gestures towards a fear for the future. Rusty fires off typical “Toltzian” bizarro analogies: “Society is like a memory foam … I advised them not to live a life in order to narrate it … They’d need to accept being, at all times, a spiritual infant and a corpse-in-waiting.”
This humour is really a type of linguistic slapstick. Instead of banana peels and pratfalls, Toltz’s characters trip over their deliberately clumsy and humiliating worldviews. A Rising of the Lights arrives at that strange cultural juncture when artificial intelligence has stepped over the boundaries of science fiction and become a subject of contemporary realism. By way of its premise and targets, the novel suggests that it will reckon with the AI “jobpocalypse”, Australia’s aged-care system crisis, and the fever pitch rhetoric of polycrisis. The targets are all in his line of sight.
These domains are all worthy of critique, but they’re really just the comic stages upon which his characters perform. Toltz does have a good ear for one-liners, but delivered without tonal variation, trapped in a ceaseless vortex of wits, I wished that occasionally he would put all jokes aside.
While the novel skirts over other areas worthy of serious lampooning – elements that are already embedded in the story and its time – it is Toltz’s full-scale embrace of aphoristic chatter that leaves me worn out. On every page you can hear the author’s own laughter. But the jokes come so thick and fast that there’s hardly a moment to take a breath and wonder what we’re laughing about.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/cult...
April 29, 2026
The only reason I finished this book was that I was away, and didn’t bring a second book with me.
Reading this book was like taking a bad acid trip combined with being stoned,
It was lucid, depressing, occasionally funny, but overall depressing and pointless.
Not my style at all
Reading this book was like taking a bad acid trip combined with being stoned,
It was lucid, depressing, occasionally funny, but overall depressing and pointless.
Not my style at all
May 1, 2026
3.75 stars
April 20, 2026
"Rusty. You'll always be the strangest person I know."
Steve Toltz. You'll always be the strangest person I don't know, and the strangest writer I've ever read. In a good way.
I'm a sucker for a weird book with edgy, unhinged characters that find themselves in absurd situations. And the characters are likeable.
You know what else I like? No forward, no acknowledgements, no author's note. Just the story. Yay.
4.5 STARS
Steve Toltz. You'll always be the strangest person I don't know, and the strangest writer I've ever read. In a good way.
I'm a sucker for a weird book with edgy, unhinged characters that find themselves in absurd situations. And the characters are likeable.
You know what else I like? No forward, no acknowledgements, no author's note. Just the story. Yay.
4.5 STARS
May 7, 2026
A big fan of Steve Toltz's books and am always happy to see another come out. Its a good sign for Australian publishing that his spiralling characters, with their deeply thought and scathingly humorous philosophical perceptions on the nature of life and society, (inherited and evolved mindsets which ultimately misalign them with the very society they want to be a part of, or at least understand, but only if it could meet them on their own terms and then somewhere along the way instead work out that they are, or find their way to being, a part of this gloriously varied humanity thing anyway, take a breath... that these kinds of character driven stories) can find a place on store shelves makes me happy.
May 4, 2026
Confusing, emotional, twisted, unhinged, sad, amusing, bizarre. My first Steve Toltz novel. My brain may need a rest before I read another! This was a book club choice…definitely got me out of my comfort zone.
May 11, 2026
A Rising of the Lights
Completely bonkers.
Started with huge promise. Very, very funny dialogue.
Then I started to question. Why so much introversion? Should I care?
Decided not to care.
But had to get to the end of this bonkers book. It would not beat me.
Wish it had.
Completely bonkers.
Started with huge promise. Very, very funny dialogue.
Then I started to question. Why so much introversion? Should I care?
Decided not to care.
But had to get to the end of this bonkers book. It would not beat me.
Wish it had.
May 2, 2026
3.5 stars really. Weird and ok.
May 5, 2026
3.5 ⭐️
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews