Author(s): Ben Tarwin

Fiction

Defiantly unconventional, elliptical, enigmatic, Daylight is a novel of fragments, taking place at the intersection of three uneasy stories: the reunion of two elderly brothers, a drowned boy, a survivor of war, lifetimes of disappointments and chance encounters all set against the backdrop of a strange and unsettling Sydney. These fragments of lives threaten to disintegrate even further, stalked by the echoes of their own peculiar, fiery quietism, caught in the no man's land between decaying difference and the recognisability of repetition, even if what recurs is just echoes and murmurs in the dark, another name for silence. Searching, disquieting, deeply Australian, Daylight is a spectral meditation on loss, belonging, and place by a singular new voice in Australian fiction.