The Town

"The Town is an impressive debut; perhaps most so for how Prescott maintains its singular and beguiling mood for the entirety of the novel--part comic satire, part existential horror. Prescott effectively conveys the sense that history and art seem incapable of reflecting the calamity of our present moment." --Zach Ravas, zyzzyva

"A bizarre novel--A seance for Kafka, Walser and Calvino. Shaun Prescott has written an ominous work of absurdity." --Catherine Lacey, author of Nobody is Ever Missing and The Answers

"The Town moves with a gentle command amid the obvious reference points of Calvino, Kafka and Ave, but it also invokes the less-celebrated novels of Steve Erickson and Rex Warner. Like them, Prescott seeks the universal in a meticulous paraphrase of the here and now, and finds the dislocation hiding in locality to show us just how lost we really may be." --Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude

"The Town really got under my skin. There's a deceptive lightness to Prescott's style, so this is a book that creeps up on the reader: all of a sudden you're swept away by, even bound to, this thing that's so mournful, intense and unsettling. It will stay with me." --Lisa McInerney, author of The Blood Miracles

"Shaun Prescott's debut novel is a dense singularity, an exploration of the idea of nowhere as the centre of the world, and a stark paean to loneliness, entropy and marginal existence--sustained by the kind of slow, luminous prose that feels like the equivalent of staring straight into the sun." --David Keenan, author of England's Hidden Reverse

"A gentle, if gnawing, safari of the existential dread on which Australia is built." --The Saturday Paper (Australia)