Shaun Prescott

Shaun Prescott

A safari of the existential dread on which Australia is built.

Shaun Prescott is a writer based in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales. He has self-released several small books of fiction, including Erica From Sales and The End of Trolleys, and has been the editor of Crawlspace Magazine. His writing has appeared in The Lifted Brow, The Guardian, and Meanjin, among other places, and The Town is his debut novel.

A radio station broadcasts tapes to an audience of none; an ex-musician drives a bus that no-one ever boards; a publican runs an empty hotel with no patrons. When a writer arrives in this New South Wales town to research vanishing Australian settlements, he is plunged into an abyss of weirdness from which he – and the town itself – might never recover.

An uncanny masterpiece, Shaun Prescott's debut novel The Town is a stunning reincarnation of the existentialist novel and a haunting excavation of historical trauma. Magnetic, strange, and absurdly slippery, this is a portrait of oblivion from Australia’s answer to Lynch, Calvino, and Kafka.