The Multiple Effects Of Rainshadow

Thea Astley

Feb 2010 · Penguin UK

About this ebook

On a January morning in 1930, in an island mission off the Queensland coast, the superintendent goes on a rampage that rips the community apart. Afterwards, only a few are free to leave, but even back on the mainland they cannot escape the effects of the brutality they've witnessed. Two decades later, violence once again erupts on the island. Here is a paradise turned hell, where the winds of change have slowed to the feeblest of breezes. Based on an actual incident that took place on Palm Island, this award-winning novel brilliantly allegorises an Australia still living in the shadow of its past. And in forecasting the tragedies of the twenty-first century, it proves itself more powerfully relevant than ever. 'Formidable . . . uniquely provocative, acerbic and glittering' The Australian

About the author

Thea Astley was born in Brisbane in 1925. She attended the University of Queensland before teaching in both Queensland and New South Wales. She was on the staff at Macquarie University in Sydney from 1968 to 1980. Astley has won the Miles Franklin Award four times: The Well Dressed Explorer in 1962, The Slow Natives in 1965, The Acolyte in 1972, and Drylands in 2000. Astley's novel, The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow, was nominated in 1997 for the Miles Franklin Award. Thea Astley is featured on the Albert Street (Brisbane) literary trail, which commemorates authors who have used Brisbane as a locale.