Below the Styx

(Paperback)

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Description

Martin Frobisher has been beating close family members about the head with an epergne. Frobisher, successful publisher and community leader, is in the City Remand Centre, awaiting trial for murder. What shadow has fallen across the comfortable lives of Frobisher, his ambitious wife, Coralie, and her flaky sister Madeleine What has led a cultivated and reflective man, known to shoo spiders and earwigs out of harm's way, to such reckless acts of violence With the prospect of imprisonment for the Term of his Natural Life, can Frobisher and his research assistant Petra find guidance in the life and fortunes of a brilliant young Englishman, marooned in Australia, 'the land of vulgarity and mob rule' more than a century earlier, and obsessed with the darker moments in the nation's history Why does Frobisher appear to care more, in the end, about the life of Marcus Clarke than he does about his own

Reviews

"An air of literary pastiche, of allusion and homage, pervades Below the Styx. It adds texture and provides much pleasure in a novel that, at first old-fashioned, develops into something new and delicately original." --Sydney Morning Herald
"Michael Meehan leads his reader through the intricacies of his protagonist's quest with an easy grace. Deft character-drawing and a story which puts some probing questions about the relation of historical reconstructions to fuictional truth-telling raise this novel well above the ruck." --Adelaide Review on Deception
"This is an intriguing, thought-provoking and complex novel. It is also extremely amusing and well-written..." --Bookseller + Publisher

Author Bio

Michael Meehan is the author of The Salt of Broken Tears, which won the NSW Premier's Award for Fiction in 2000.