A timely work of unbridled imagination from a startling new voice, Elizabeth Bryer, From Here On, Monsters is an ambitious, noirish allegory for any fan of Claire G. Coleman’s Terra Nullius or Shaun Prescott’s The Town.
In a city locked in a kind of perpetual twilight, antiquarian bookseller Cameron Raybould accepts a very strange commission – the valuation of a rare codex.
Within its fragile pages Cameron makes a curious discovery. Although seemingly ancient, the codex tells of a modern mystery: an academic missing for eleven years.
Stranger still, as finding the truth becomes ever more of an obsession, Cameron begins to notice frightening lapses in memory. As if, all around, words, images, even people are beginning to fade from sight.
As if unravelling the riddle of this book may be unravelling the nature of reality itself. And something frightening and unknown is taking its place…
A noirish mystery. An allegory for our troubled nation. From Here On, Monsters stretches the boundaries of what we consider fiction in weird and totally wonderful ways…
“Traverses the chasm between truth and history, and challenges our faith in the liberatory potential of art. It’s a modern Australian novel about modern Australia that, refreshingly, doesn’t read at all like a modern Australian novel.” – Shaun Prescott
Elizabeth Bryer grew up in Heyfield and now lives in Birraranga/Melbourne, on never-ceded sovereign lands of the Gunaikurnai and Kulin nations respectively. Novels she has translated from Spanish include Claudia Salazar Jiménez’s Blood of the Dawn (Deep Vellum, 2016) and Aleksandra Lun’s The Palimpsests (David R. Godine, 2019), for which she was awarded a PEN/Heim from PEN America. She was inaugural translations editor of The Lifted Brow, and she is still hanging around at Brow Books.
Elizabeth Bryer’s From Here On, Monsters is published by Picador and is available from all leading book retailers including Booktopia.
Image: From Here On, Monsters by Elizabeth Bryer