Overview

Thirty-something Nick is walking down Parramatta Road's six lanes of thundering traffic to see his former girlfriend Penny for the first time since they agreed to be 'just friends'. By the novel's end, he is racing back up that same road so he doesn't lose her.Nick and Penny's awkward romance is played out against the backdrop of high capitalism and the rise of the digital age. Bombarded by advertisements, slogans, news, wars, politics and consumerism, just a little silence is hard to find. Even in the bedroom with the woman he wants so much to love, Nick's mind spirals off to other times and places.Through him we revisit the Gulf War watched on a rented TV in a London flat; we meet the girl who broke his heart; and veteran political journalist Kerry O'Brien interviews Margaret Thatcher in a pastiche of Molly Bloom's soliloquy. In the hyperbolic, media-driven world they inhabit, can Nick and Penny somehow find ways of being, and maybe even being together?In a world of casualised employment, media saturation and a constant push for market innovation, what happens to the fundamental human need for belonging? What happens to the most fundamental relationships between people when they are asked to build their lives on quicksand? What is it like to live and love in the time of contemporary capitalism?

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9781742584157

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Anthony Macris is an Australian writer and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Technology, Sydney. His first novel in the Capital series, Capital, Volume One, won him a listing as Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist 1998, and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Southeast Asian section) Best First Book 1998. His book reviews, articles and features have appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, Griffith Review and The Bulletin for over a decade. He is also the author of When Horse Became Saw, his family’s inspirational story and a powerful evocation of the world of autism, which was shortlisted for the 2012 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards: Non-fiction category.

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