the coming of the whirlpool andrew mcgahan

revelation of life in the slow lane of drugs and sex and alcohol.' - 'The Weekend Australian'Īndrew McGahan was born in Dalby, Queensland, and now lives in Victoria. 'McGahan's book is a bracing slap in the face to conventional platitudes and hypocrisies.' - 'The Australian' 'Praise is one of those books that takes a hefty bite out of a piece of subject matter, chews it to a pulp and then spits it out.' - Peter Craven 'A tour de force. A time when, for two hopeless souls, sex and dependence were the only lifelines. A time when the dole was easier to get than a job, when heroin was better known than ecstasy, and when ambition was the dirtiest of words. 'Praise' is an utterly frank and darkly humorous novel about being young in the Australia of the 1990s. Shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Award, the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature and the Canada-Australia Literary Award. But what no one knows, because neither his uncle nor his mother actually ever see him, is that William is ill and his condition is gradually worsening.Winner of The 'Australian'/Vogel Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book in the Pacific Region. William’s mother desperately wants her son to ingratiate himself so that he will become John McIvor’s heir. For recently passed laws entitle the native peoples to reclaim certain sacred sites. He enlists him to work in a crackpot political party he is active in, whose policy is to thwart the Aborigines’ attempts to recover ancestral territory. McIvor tries to imbue William with his obsession for the land. His life has been devoted to putting the estate back together he has only recently partially succeeded and moved into the disintegrating, once elegant mansion, Kuran House.

The bitter, childless old man had been brought up to expect to marry the heiress to Kuran Station a grand estate in the Australian Outback only to be disappointed by his rejection and the subsequent selling off of the land. When young William’s ineffectual father is killed in an accidental fire, he is cast upon the charity of an unknown great uncle, John McIvor.

It reverberates long after it’s been finished.’ The New Zealand Herald ‘A powerful work, filled with passion and a kind of surreal grandiosity… At another it’s a national allegory, with its portent that past wrongs will come back to haunt future generations.’ The Age At one level a suspenseful gothic thriller. A lean, intelligent, and incisive novel.’ The Sydney Morning HeraldĬould have stepped from the pages of a Dickens novel…

The coming of the whirlpool andrew mcgahan