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A gripping thriller and a chilling glimpse of an imaginary world that seems all too real.

About the Author

Thomas Keneally won the Booker Prize in 1982 with Schindler's Ark, later made into the Academy Award-winning film Schindler's List by Steven Spielberg. His non-fiction, includes the memoir Searching for Schindler and Three Famines, an LA Times Book of the Year, and the histories The Commonwealth of Thieves, The Great Shame and American Scoundrel. His fiction, includes The Daughters of Mars, The Widow and Her Hero (shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award), An Angel in Australia and Bettany's Book. His novels The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest, and Confederates were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize, while Bring Larks and Heroes and Three Cheers for the Paraclete won the Miles Franklin Award. The People's Train was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, South East Asia division.

Reviews

In this gripping political allegory, the author of Schindler's List examines a more contemporary instance of people trying to survive in the ethical quagmire of totalitarianism. The protagonist is Alan Sheriff, a writer living in a nameless desert country ruled by a despot who styles himself the "Great Uncle" and who bears an uncanny resemblance to a certain recently deposed dictator. A member of the Westernized cultural elite with a fat book contract from Random House, Alan feels himself immune from the political pressures and poverty surrounding him. Then one day he is whisked off to receive a commission from the tyrant himself: to ghostwrite a novel for Great Uncle that will undermine support for sanctions in the West-on a quite literal one-month deadline. Fearing for himself and his friends, torn between remaining in his gilded cage or striking out for a precarious existence abroad, Alan must make agonizing compromises with the truth and his art. Keneally treats this potentially lurid scenario in a realistic and enthralling fashion that fully humanizes all the characters, secret police goons included. In his hands, the clich? of the suffering artiste struggling to avoid selling out takes on real depth and pathos. This is an exquisitely wrought study of moral corruption in a convincing-and frighteningly modern-political dystopia. Agent, Amanda Urban. (June) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

When the narrator in The Tyrant's Novel preface visits a Sydney refugee detention centre, Keneally cleverly woos the reader into thinking that his topical new novel is, in fact, factual. There is endless fodder for reading group and dinner party discussion with this engrossing and surprisingly accessible story of dictatorship, propaganda and corruption in the terrifying society of an unnamed oil-rich country obviously modelled on Saddam's Iraq. The tyrant (known as 'Great Uncle') forces our protagonist (celebrated writer Alan Sheriff) to ghost-pen a great novel telling of the country's suffering under economic sanctions. Keneally's device of using Anglo-Saxon names throughout provides a human face and cultural context to which we can relate in a manner not possible had unfamiliar Arabic names been used. It enables us to place ourselves in Sheriff's shoes and question what our own reactions would be to his nightmare dilemmas and ultimate incarceration Down Under. At the same time, Keneally delivers a scathing attack on our own government's detention policy. In so doing, he provides an important and thought-provoking book capable of being read on many levels. Economically written at just under 300 pages, The Tyrant's Novel arguably packs Keneally's biggest punch to date. Scott Whitmont is the owner of Lindfield Bookshop. C. 2003 Thorpe-Bowker and contributors