'Everybody knows that Jorn Utzon did not use luck to design Sydney's famous Opera House, the Queen Victoria Building was never the centre of a budding microstate on the North Shore, and that Governor and Mrs Macquarie were not cross-dressers. Everyone, that is, except the protagonist of Impossible the Next, a novel that re-imagines the history of real places in Sydney by following the adventures of a roguish travel writer with a penchant for lying about history.
'It starts at Camp Cove, the little harbour beach just inside South Head which was the original landing place of the First Fleet which the correspondent “discovers” was a fiction invented to boost property prices. And that’s just the start of his adventures – what follows is a series of absurd vignettes that defy credibility and logic in increasingly inventive ways. The correspondent tirelessly uncovers “truths” about famous places in the city, taking Sydney’s history and giving it just the right twist to keep readers guessing.
'At first his misrepresentation is harmless enough, but will the correspondent himself be the ultimate victim of his inability to tell fact from fiction? ' (Publication summary)
