To Name Those Lost
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A novel of a father and son in search of each other on the Australian frontier of the 1870s: “Brutal, brilliant, beautiful” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune).
It is the summer of 1874. Launceston, a colonial outpost on the southern Australian island of Tasmania, hovers on the brink of anarchy, teeming with revolutionaries, convicts, drunks, crooked cops, and poor strugglers looking for a break. Outlaw Thomas Toosey races to this dangerous bedlam to find his motherless twelve-year-old son before the city swallows the child whole, but he is pursued by more than just the law. Hindering his progress at every turn is a man to whom he owes a terrible debt: the vengeful Irishman Fitheal Flynn, whose hooded companion hides a grotesque secret . . .
Based on real events, this prize-winning novel of vengeance and redemption, set against the sweeping, merciless grandeur of the frontier, “brings to mind the prose of Cormac McCarthy, Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner [and] catapults us into the vicious, impoverished world of a colonial town in Tasmania” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune).
“Readers who admired the propulsive plotting, atmospheric sense of place, and fierce family loyalty in Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road should be equally taken with Wilson’s superb novel. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal (starred review)
Winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and the Adelaide Festival Award for Best Novel
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wilson's (The Roving Party) second novel is as violent, bleak, and absorbing as his highly-praised first. Again the setting is Tasmania, this time taking place in 1874. The efficient plot could be described as the tale of two seekers, dogged and inimical, squaring off. Thomas Toosey, an ex-convict said to be "on winking terms with the devil," is looking for his son, whose deceased mother he abandoned, to start a new life together. The Irishman Fitheal Flynn, "mad as a sack of rabbits," is looking for Toosey, who stole a considerable amount of money from him, and committing a more heinous act in the process. As Toosey gets closer to finding his son, Flynn gets closer to catching up with Toosey. They all converge in the chaotic, rough-and-tumble town of Launceston, whose inhabitants are rioting in protest of a new railway tax. Wilson has a fine ear for dialogue and nicely sketches main and supporting characters alike, except in the case of a lamentably cartoonish Chinese innkeeper. The brisk tale doesn't wade too deeply into the historical weeds, rather proceeding steadily to its final confrontations, inevitable but dramatic, savage but not gratuitous. This is a satisfying, grimy adventure about a reciprocal violence that pollutes.
