In 1492, Spain believed itself to have discovered the New World, as they referred to Abya Yala. Even in European terms this was not a discovery, the Norse explorer Leif Erikson having travelled through North America in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Archaeologists, historians and academics still dispute when Abya Yala was first inhabited.

My mother and father missed it all. Bunnykins to bomber jackets, dummies to cigarettes. I was raised somewhere else. Given another mum. A different dad. Handed around until I stuck like a stickle brick to my brand-new brother, who was also riding the magic carousel of secret adoption circa 1970. Our shared reality was a […]

In January 2021, one day after thousands of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, I underwent a craniotomy far from home in Loveland, Colorado to remove a low-grade tumour from the front left of my brain. In 2016 the World Health Organization stopped calling such tumours ‘benign’ as, when it comes to the brain, anything where it should not be cannot be classed as benign.

Blurbed as ‘The stunning, explosive new novel from the bestselling author of The Museum of Modern Love, winner of the 2017 Stella Prize’, Bruny is, according to the Allen & Unwin PR department, a ‘searing, subversive novel about family, love, loyalty and the new world order’, ‘a cry from the heart and a fiercely entertaining and crucial work of imagination’, one that dares to ask ‘burning’ questions like ‘How far would they go? How far would you?’ and ‘What would you do to protect the place you love?'

Ray puts his mouth up to the gap between the window and the car door-frame. Still, everything smells of burning. Smoky air grazes his throat, punches his lungs. His head spins and he slumps back into the driver’s seat. No matter what he does, he can’t stop his hands from shaking. I could go out, he thinks, find her.

‘Overlanding’, as in droving cattle across country at distance, waxed as a literary trope precisely as it waned as a means of labour. Like its dialectical opposite the Squatter, the Overlander is etymologically multiple, meaning both the drover who is employed and respectable, and the sundowner, who is itinerant and suspect.