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'In this time, the great spirit haze dome sitting over the pristine essence of Praiseworthy became a spectacle of colourful butterflies and iridescent winged insects in flight, which were chased by birds of great numbers like seagulls and starlings. It was another miracle with possible cultural tourism potential.'

'...looking like a tarted-up axolotl with squashed alfoil-encased dreadlocks around her rivers-of-grog white talcum-covered face, mascara streaking from her eyes down over smeared red lips, so that Maureen could not help thinking that Rivers of Grog must have spent some time in a creek a few hours ago pashing frogs'

'The sea, while looking from afar, saw the banned beach of this solemn and lonely place where even the mud crabs were gone to try their luck elsewhere, leaving behind all their ancestral ghosts of countless millennia to be born over and over in the wrong time. The sea sighed, turned its back and continued to withdraw further away from the expansion of mudflats.'

'he felt pleased in remembering the look on Tommyhawk’s face when he had the electricity cut off to the house. See who you can iPhone now? Go on texter, text someone then. What? You got no power. Did the government forgot to give you free electricity with your computer and mobile phone? Well! See who pays for the power. Text them to pay for it. Remember who puts the food into your mouth? It’s not government.'

'The toddlers cried because they had only learnt to speak minimal English, and could not find the words to articulate how they felt about Australian laws, and were still unable to discuss at length what government legislation meant to them, even though these racist laws were an inheritance tainted intergenerationally in their blood.'

'[He] berated them frequently about... white plastic shopping bag rubbish devils haunting them, Did you fight them? Tell me you knocked their guts out? Destroy those plastic shopping bags? And when they said, We were too spooked to walk up to the fence line, and punch those plastic bag devils in their mongrel pollution-creating gaping mouths, and yank them off the barbwire fence, he said, Tell me you are kidding me.'

'In his storybook, he saw the palace of government surrounded by gardens that extended to every horizon, and he saw with his own eyes the millions of golden leaves falling off trees, so much gold it was just left lying on the ground. There were no camp dogs at Parliament House. No gonorrhoea-tail feral donkeys. No cemeteries, because he heard that Canberra politicians never died.'

'These were the new legends now. New sagas. What those ancestors asked, what happened to all those spirit children we gave you for country? Everyone in the whole country was asking that, not just those people of Praiseworthy. Where did those children go? Do you think the ancestors will destroy us before they leave too? Look at all these calamities breathing, breathing into the stories connecting country.'

'The haze swirled into s-bends, and made the whole sunrise madder. It whorled, reigned in, and tightened into a frenzied dance over Praiseworthy, then it exhaled a tinkling shower of vapour, dawn dew droplets dampened the town, settling everywhere, and creating a humidity mingled with slithers of negativity in pre-dawn story mutterings about what had been fed into the metaphorical stomach. Nothing.'

'Hate place was a monument of the moment for some of the poorest people on Earth. A hard bit of magic grown from a corpus of ancient stories that had been scattered into mystery by broken spirits creating hell fires. All those endlessly wandering fragments of ancient words were coming together, and forming the lines of stories entombed in smoke clouds circumnavigating the planet.'

'No matter what you care about in this world, or whether you give two frigs, there will always be times, when nobody will like hearing a scary future thinker’s doom stories about the destruction of the globe'

Hello friends! I haven't been getting notifications when someone comments on one of my reviews (not sure how long this has been an issue).

I'm so sorry if I have not replied back to your comments!!

Other than that, hi! How you going?

This is incredible. And I can't read it without getting the Portishead song stuck in my head for hours...

This is seriously gorgeous writing.

Not sure what to think of this. My expectations were sky-high, so perhaps I am judging it to an impossible standard?

Hi friends! Here's my 2023 Booker Prize longlist ranking:

1. The Bee Sting 5*
2. Pearl 4.5*
3. In Ascension 4.5*
4. If I Survive You 4*
5. Old God's Time 4*
6. Prophet Song 4*
7. All the Little Bird-Hearts 4*
8. Study for Obedience 3.5*
9. This Other Eden 3.5*
10. How to Build a Boat 3*
11. Western Lane 3*
12. The House of Doors 3*
13. A Spell of Good Things 3*