Overview

David is a scout. For ten years he has plundered the ruins of an alien civilisation about which he knows nothing. Now he’s ready to go home, a wealthy man. Except that everything seems to be slipping out of his control. His mentor Tom has vanished. Eliza and her baby are alone. As David begins to question the choices he has made, he is visited by a researcher, who wants him to guide her on one last expedition to the rainswept wasteland of the plateau… And he may yet lose everything, as he is drawn inexorably towards an encounter with the terrifying soul of this world. John Morrissey’s Bird Deity is a novel like no other. At once disconcerting and eerily familiar, it’s a cosmic horror story about power, theft, love, loss, and destiny.

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9781922790781

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Reviews

'Bird Deity is a spare and moving story about the burden of history and the vicissitudes of the colonial project. Morrissey's novel has a dignified, undeniable power. It's like Coetzee in space. I devoured it.’ * Dominic Amerena * ‘Here is a sharp and compelling new voice in Australian fiction...I read Firelight breathlessly.’ * Jennifer Down on Firelight * ‘Firelight introduces us to a young writer with a dedication to the craft of short fiction. Each of John Morrissey’s stories is a gem, while the collection as a whole is superb.’ * Tony Birch on Firelight * ‘An exemplary collection...Engages with both a sense of wonderment and our innate capacity for compassion, wonderful and abstracted at turns, often simultaneously.’ * Australian Book Review on Firelight *

Author Information

John Morrissey is a Melbourne writer of Kalkadoon descent. He was the winner of the 2020 Indigenous Writers Mentorship and runner-up for the Nakata Brophy Prize in 2018. John’s debut Firelight won an Aurealis Award and a Queensland Literary Award, and in 2024 he was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist. Bird Deity is his first novel.

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