Silences Long Gone

(Paperback)

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They're flying me across the country to fight a hag. They think to reason with. But I know to fight.

An iron town is dying.

Inside a fibro bungalow in a horizon-wide mirage Belle Furphy is watching from her kitchen window while her town is dismantled around her and trucked south. Ignoring the Dreamtime and spurning the Multinational and vowing to die here where she long ago dug the ashes of her family into the rock of the land, she's becoming the island they say no man is.

Flying in from the east coast is her estranged son Jack with his Sunset Village brochures: snapshots of happy deaths on ergonomic beds with palliative carers hovering angelically overhead.

Out the front of her house in airconditioned site-vans housewreckers play poker and read letters from her happily relocated neighbours at her through a megaphone. And they wait -for her resolve to give; or for her heart to give. Or for word finally to come through that, at last, nobody is watching . . .

Author Bio

Anson Cameron was born in Shepparton, Victoria, in 1961. His first novel, Silences Long Gone, released in 1998, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. He has since written four more novels - Tin Toys (2000), Confessing the Blues (2002), Lies I Told About a Girl (2006) and Stealing Picasso (2009) - and the short story collection Pepsi Bear and other Stories. He lives in Melbourne where he writes a column for The Age newspaper.