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The Swan Book
- Narrated by: Jacqui Katona
- Length: 13 hrs and 1 min
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Publisher's Summary
The new novel by Alexis Wright, whose previous novel, Carpentaria, won the Miles Franklin Award and four other major prizes including the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year Award.
The Swan Book is set in the future, with Aboriginals still living under the Intervention in the north, in an environment fundamentally altered by climate change. It follows the life of a mute teenager called Oblivia, the victim of gang rape by petrol-sniffing youths, from the displaced community where she lives in a hulk, in a swamp filled with rusting boats and thousands of black swans driven from other parts of the country, to her marriage to Warren Finch, the first Aboriginal president of Australia, and her elevation to the position of first lady, confined to a tower in a flooded and lawless southern city.
The Swan Book has all the qualities which made Wright's previous novel, Carpentaria, a prize-winning best seller. It offers an intimate awareness of the realities facing Aboriginal people; the wild energy and humour in her writing finds hope in the bleakest situations; and the remarkable combination of storytelling elements drawn from myth and legend and fairy tale.
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What listeners say about The Swan Book
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Julia
- 26-07-2021
Excellent future fiction read
This was a beautiful future fiction story that rally touched on happenings of today. It felt real. It felt lived. Highly recommended. Will have to listen to it again!
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- Jenny T.
- 15-05-2021
The great Australian novel?
I think I have just finished The Great Australian Novel. Impossible to categorize, assign it to a genre. What a roller coaster of a reading experience! I am blown away,. It's intellectually, morally and politically challenging. Beautiful, ugly, poetic, crazily humorous borrowing from myriad sources, cultures, philosophies, traditions, unceasingly surprising. delightful, worrying, sad, shocking, funny. A tour de force.
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- Lorenna Zanetti
- 20-08-2018
Confusing
Might just be over my head, but this was the most confusing book I've ever encountered.
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