Each morning, the last humans start their day with graphic footage from the front. This is what sustains them - literally.
In a world where eight billion souls have perished, the survivors huddle together apart, perpetually at war, in the city-states of Rise and Shine. Yet this war, far from representing their doom, is their means of survival. For their leaders have found the key to life when crops, livestock, and the very future have been blighted - a key that turns on each citizen being moved by human suffering. The question is, with memories still bright of all the friends they've lost, all the experience they'll never know, will compassion be enough? Or must they succumb to, or even embrace, darker desires?
Rise and Shine is a tale that speaks to our troubled times, a Kafkaesque fable of hope from the imagination of Miles Franklin nominee Patrick Allington.
Praise for Figurehead-
'Brilliant ... With its Kundera touch, suave style and assured scepticism, Figurehead fascinates, appalls, and introduces an impressive talent.'
-The Age
Praise for Figurehead-
'Original in conception and dauntless in execution.'
-The Australian
Praise for Figurehead-
'Risky, bold, and evocative.'
-The Advertiser
Praise for Figurehead-
'The boundary between truth and history has always been elastic but novelist Patrick Allington uses the middle ground as a trampoline, gleefully leaping between what is plausibly known and what is demonstrably invented.'
-Sydney Morning Herald
