'In a city locked in a kind of perpetual twilight, an antiquarian bookseller accepts a very strange commission - the valuation of a rare codex. Within its fragile pages is the story of another book, another codex, but unravelling the mystery may mean unravelling the nature of reality itself...
'A noirish mystery. A speculative fiction with a social conscience. An unbridled imagination, and a scholar's bibliomanic preoccupations. From Here On, Monsters stretches the boundaries of what we consider fiction in weird and totally wonderful ways...'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'My mother and I wanted to open a bookshop. We signed up for a CAE course, which was cancelled when the bookseller who ran it went out of business. I learnt this later because I went on to work in a bookshop and the book business is a small world.' (Introduction)
'Bryer’s debut novel is a challenging and artful work that plays with parallels.'
'We inhabit a moment where reality seems increasingly malleable, a construct that serves the interests of the powerful by eliding and obscuring the truth. From police demanding journalists submit to fingerprinting to the rejection of science by lobby groups and politicians, the control and manipulation of information has become so normalised that most of the time we no longer even notice it.'(Introduction)
'Elizabeth Bryer’s From Here On, Monsters is a genuinely exciting debut from an Australian writer. This novel is playful, allegorical and formally ambitious, qualities that lend it a distinctly international flavour, in the way of Peter Carey’s early work. (Notably, Bryer has previously produced English translations of Spanish-language novels.) And, like Carey’s work, From Here On, Monsters has something urgent to say about contemporary Australia.' (Introduction)
'The most charismatic of the many monsters in Elizabeth Bryer’s début novel is the conceptual artist Maddison Worthington, who commands attention with her lipstick of ‘Mephistophelian red’ and her perfume of ‘white woods, musk and heliotrope’. From the solitude of a labyrinthine mansion, Worthington devises headline-grabbing installations, and performances that often incorporate hidden-camera footage of her audiences. Her ideas, though provocative, are largely stolen from her assistants or from little-known artists in developing countries. Worst of all, Worthington has accepted a lucrative – some would say Faustian – commission from the Department of Immigration for a project called ‘Excise Our Hearts’.' (Introduction)
'We inhabit a moment where reality seems increasingly malleable, a construct that serves the interests of the powerful by eliding and obscuring the truth. From police demanding journalists submit to fingerprinting to the rejection of science by lobby groups and politicians, the control and manipulation of information has become so normalised that most of the time we no longer even notice it.'(Introduction)
'My mother and I wanted to open a bookshop. We signed up for a CAE course, which was cancelled when the bookseller who ran it went out of business. I learnt this later because I went on to work in a bookshop and the book business is a small world.' (Introduction)
