Their Brilliant Careers (Hardback)

Ryan O’Neill

The fantastic lives of sixteen extraordinary Australian writers

WINNER: Australian PM’s Award for Fiction

SHORTLISTED: Miles Franklin Literary Award

Absurd, original and highly addictive, Their Brilliant Careers is a hilarious novel in the guise of sixteen biographies of (invented) Australian writers.

Subjects include Rachel Deverall, who unearthed the secret source of the great literature of our time and paid a terrible price for her discovery; Rand Washington, hugely popular sci-fi author, body-builder and inveterate racist; and Addison Tiller, whose stories set in the outback were bestsellers even though he had never actually travelled outside Sydney. And let’s not forget experimental writer Arthur ruhtrA, who wrote a whole novel without once using the letter C.

Every page – from the dedication to the index – is fraudulent, each biography interweaving with the rest to form a magnificent lie. The result is a sparklingly inventive award-winning novel.

‘Blackly hilarious and structurally audacious. What it offers is something strange and often wonderful, a wildly inventive and formally dazzling reworking of both the tropes and traditions of Australian literature, and by extension Australian culture more generally’ The Spectator

‘It’s glorious. So funny and clever and entertaining’ Marian Keyes

‘A divine satire on the narcissism of the literary world’ The i Paper

‘A brilliant work of fiction’ Stewart Lee

‘The most unexpected literary delight of my year’ Irish Independent

‘Brims with crackerjack wit. Pressure is subtly built; punchlines are explosive’ Australian Book Review

‘[Ryan O’Neill] offers a book that is a piss-take, a celebration, a revisionist history and, perhaps most impressively, exceedingly good fun’ The Australian

‘A top-to-tail fiction that trades in plausibility. O’Neill employs a form of artifice that strives, stubbornly, for originality against dulling convention, especially in the rendering of human anguish. It is mercilessly funny in places’ Sydney Morning Herald

‘Absolutely fascinating and beguilingly strange’ Robin Ince

Hardback

Published: Lightning (April 2018)

ISBN: 9781785630675