An Item from the Late News

An Item from the Late News

First edition
Author Thea Astley
Country Australia
Language English
Publisher University of Queensland Press, Australia
Publication date
1982
Media type Print (Hardback and Paperback)
Pages 200
ISBN 0702217026
Preceded by A Kindness Cup
Followed by Beachmasters

An Item from the Late News (1982) is a novel by Australian author Thea Astley.

Plot summary

The narrator here is arch, sarcastic, oblique Gabby, a painter who, in reaction against her boring upper-middle family, has been through marriage, affairs, bohemianism, and a breakdown..Now, back in her home-town of Allbut, a former mining center that's become a near-ghost town ""in our continental funkerama,"" Gabby is oddly entranced by a newcomer named Wafer--an overage hippie whose only goal is to find ""the perfect bomb shelter."" (His father was a WW II bomb fatality; he's obsessed with Hiroshima.) But Wafer's quiet quest on the town's outskirts will be doomed--by the town's greed and hypocrisy and violence, by Gabby's own self-involved apathy: Wafer is terrorized by a local macho-thug; his fatherly affection for a teenage girl (the thug's rape victim) is used against him. And when Wafer happens to find a precious stone on one of his wanderings, the town will stop at nothing to learn the location of this possible new gem-lode. . . with a predictably fatal outcome.[1]

Reviews

References

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