Each morning, the last humans start their day with graphic footage from the front. This is what sustains them--literally.
For fans of George Saunders, Claire Vaye Watkins, Michel Faber, and anyone hungry for the next page-turning book of cli-fi and speculative fiction.
In a world where eight billion souls have perished in the wake of an ecological catastrophe, the survivors huddle together apart, perpetually at war, in the city-states of Rise and Shine. Yet this war, far from representing their doom, is their means of survival. For their leaders have found the key to life when crops, livestock, and the very future have been blighted--a key that turns on each citizen being moved by human suffering. Yet is this small hope, this compassion, enough to sustain them against the despair born of all the friends they've lost, all the experience they'll never know? Or must they succumb to, or even embrace, darker desires?
A Kafkaesque fable of hope.
About the Author :
Patrick Allington is a writer, critic, editor, and academic. His fiction includes the novel Figurehead, which was longlisted for the 2010 Miles Franklin award, as well as short fiction published in Meanjin, Griffith Review, The Big Issue, and elsewhere. Patrick is a lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Flinders University.
Review :
"Thirty years ago, the Earth caved in on itself, killing eight billion people and dividing history between the Old Time and the New Time. Not long after the tragedy, when food and resources were scarce, friends Walker and Barton discovered that humanity's fascination with conflict would distract them from their hunger. The pair devised a plan to refocus the population: they divided survivors into two opposing states and simulated a never-ending war between them...[an] abstract portrait of humanity's struggle to survive in a world decimated by man's foolhardy choices and climate crises."
--Library Journal
"Allington's debut is set in a future Australia devastated by climate change and nuclear war... Fans of dystopian science fiction will find this tale, from a new voice from Australia, of interest."
--Booklist
"You never knew fiction could do this."
--Jane Rawson, author of From the Wreck
"A novel of rare visionary brilliance, Rise & Shine blew me away."
--Bram Presser, author of The Book of Dirt
"Fiercely imaginative and astonishingly written."
--Robbie Arnott, author of Flames and The Rain Heron
"[T]he apocalypse told as an absurdist black comedy... a funny novel. ... Allington is also not afraid to play up the absurdity of his premise, whether it's the overly polite officers who interrogate the dissenters or a family giving thanks for the battle they're about to witness. In the end, though, the novel's best gag, a beautifully judged bit of black comedy, is that it takes the death of billions and the devastation of the planet for humankind to find a practical use for compassion."
--Locus Magazine
"[Rise & Shine] could easily be an episode of Charlie Brooker's Netflix series Black Mirror...Rise & Shine does not shy away from the complex moral terrain of political agency. Carefully, subtly, Allington lets the tension between multiple propositions build: that law and order form a part of collective survival; that service of the people can easily slip into control of the people; that people want a leader; that effective leadership requires multiple perspectives; that people can change; that some people don't. Allington sustains the tension until the final pages, where he offers a thought-provoking ending worthy of his imaginative take on dystopia."
--Australian Book Review
"There is a definite Kafkaesque air to Allington's writing, as well as echoes of 1984 and Brave New World...The dialogue is one of the great strengths of Rise & Shine: buoyantly paced, drolly comic and easily absorbing...Rise & Shine is apt reading for our current atmosphere of environmental, societal and economic precarity. It is an undeniably imaginative and engrossing fable."
--The Age
"Rise & Shine is a piece of timely, suitably intriguing speculative fiction."
--Herald Sun
"Patrick Allington's Rise & Shine, drops up headfirst into a future in the wake of an ecological catastrophe that claimed the lives of more than eight billion people...The novel strikes a balance between the absurd and the horrific that feels reminiscent of George Saunders' science-fiction work."
--The Saturday Paper
"It should be of interest to fans of satire, surrealism and magic realism. Rise & Shine is clearly inspired by texts such as Brave New World, Catch-22 and even Waiting for Godot. It is an able critique of reality TV, media manipulation, personality politics and ecological catastrophe."
--Books+Publishing
"Richly imagined and described and close enough to our own world to feel scarily possible." FOUR STARS
--Good Reading
"Unputdownable."
--ANZ LitLovers
"An astonishingly imaginative work of speculative fiction."
--Kill Your Darlings
Praise for Figurehead:
"Brilliant...With its Kundera touch, suave style and assured scepticism, Figurehead fascinates, appalls, and introduces an impressive talent."
--The Age
Praise for Figurehead:
"Original in conception and dauntless in execution."
--The Australian
Praise for Figurehead:
"Risky, bold, and evocative."
--The Advertiser
Praise for Figurehead:
"The boundary between truth and history has always been elastic but novelist Patrick Allington uses the middle ground as a trampoline, gleefully leaping between what is plausibly known and what is demonstrably invented."
--Sydney Morning Herald
