'The Town is Shaun Prescott’s full-length fiction debut and the sophomore novel from The Lifted Brow – the avant-garde Australian literary mag that, since moving into trade publishing last year, has championed writers whose ideas and execution run against the grain of commercial literary trends. Take this book: a deep dive into weirdness that reads like a blend of Donald Horne and García Márquez – although it contains little of the magic realist’s joie de vivre. Call it magical fatalism.' (Introduction)