Praiseworthy

by Alexis Wright

Lands-rights activist and Indigenous writer Alexis Wright is an award-winning author and member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Deeply informed and inspired by the sagas and literatures of the world, she walks her path fiercely allied with the ancient truths and present facts of the Aboriginal Australian life. “Praiseworthy,” her latest book, is a hallucinatory, uncompromising, and genre-breaking work in ten oracle-parts. A massive beast of a novel, it pushes allegory and language to the very limit. It may well be the last novel to read before the sun falls on us. Alexis Wright’s aching prose of vision and tenacity is an offering that urges a new reading of the past and future fate of the world—and we would do well to heed her pleadings. — Herbert Pföstl, Book Consultant for the New Museum Store.

In a small town in the north of Australia, a mysterious haze cloud heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors. A visionary on his own holy quest, Cause Man Steel seeks the perfect platinum donkey to launch an Aboriginal-owned donkey transport industry, saving Country and the world from fossil fuels. His wife, Dance, seeking solace from his madness, studies butterflies and moths and dreams of repatriating her family to China. One of their sons, named Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to end it all by walking into the sea. Their other child, Tommyhawk, wants nothing more than to be adopted by Australia’s most powerful white woman. Praiseworthy is an epic masterpiece that bends time and reality―a cry of outrage against oppression, greed, and assimilation.

2024; paperback; 5.4 x 8 inches; 672 pages; ISBN: 9780811238014.