The Island Will Sink (Briohny Doyle, Brow Books)

Local literary journal The Lifted Brow makes its first foray into trade publishing with this debut speculative-fiction novel by regular Brow columnist Briohny Doyle. In the middle-distant future, major ecological disasters are commonplace, although their human impact is largely held at bay by complex technological systems. Max, a successful producer of immersive disaster films, is disconnected from his wife and children and has lost the capability to retain memories or superfluous information—computers take care of all that. The Island Will Sink follows other recent Australian literary novels exploring the ‘cinematic uncertainty’ of climate change, such as James Bradley’s Clade and Mireille Juchau’s The World Without Us, though it differs in that its capacious scientific and ethical imagination is embedded in a world barely recognisable as our own. A disconcerting sense of alienation flows through Doyle’s novel; characters are so disconnected from one another that the reader also struggles to find an emotional entry point. But this is a work of satire, and this lack of emotional connectivity is also a powerful narrative device. This same detachment also raises probing questions about memory, legacy and the emotional imprints we leave on others—and what of us is left behind when these imprints disappear.

Veronica Sullivan is prize manager of the Stella Prize

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