Book launch: Bon and Lesley by Shaun Prescott (with live music by Troth)

About this event 

Please join us to celebrate the launch of Bon and Lesley (Giramondo, September 2022), the new novel by the internationally acclaimed author of The Town, Shaun Prescott.

The launch will take place on 6 October at The Burdekin's Lava Lounge (level 3)*, with a reading by Prescott and a live music performance by Troth, a Newcastle-based duo whose work shares significant links with Prescott's work.

Copies of Bon and Lesley will be sold on the night through event bookseller Better Read Than Dead, with signings by Prescott. There will be a bar tab for early arrivals, with additional food and drink also available for purchase from the Burdekin menu.

This event is free, but RSVP is essential. Please register through Eventbrite to attend.

*Please note The Burdekin is a strictly 18+ venue. No minors, sorry!

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ABOUT BON AND LESLEY

When a spreading fire in the mountains stops his train, Bon looks out the window and does what he’s always imagined he might – he gets off the train, and steps out of his life. In the desolate regional town of Newnes, he falls into the company of Steven and Jack Grady, two brothers, one garrulous, the other all but silent, both drawn like moths to the chaos of the coming days. When Lesley – an enigmatic fellow escapee from the city – arrives, they coalesce into a makeshift family unit, bound by a deep and strange attachment. They fall into a routine fuelled by cheap alcohol and fast food, reading shopping catalogues and seeking hidden paths in the forest, while trying to make sense of the darkness that seems to be encroaching on their lives. Depicting a world of peculiar anarchies and regulations, of secret portals that lurk beneath the country’s failing design, Bon and Lesley is an urgent, surreal dispatch that asks where care persists in a country intimately familiar with catastrophe.

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ABOUT SHAUN PRESCOTT

Shaun Prescott is a writer based in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales. His debut novel The Town was published in Australia, the UK, USA, Germany, Japan, Netherlands and Spain.

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ABOUT TROTH

Troth are a Newcastle-based duo comprising Amelia Besseny and Cooper Bowman. Their music fluidly blends minimal synthpop, immersive ambient soundscapes and site-specific sound-art experiments. During the three years they have been working together, they have released several albums for international and Australian labels and have recently completed a tour of Europe and the UK.

Troth's music shares many commonalities with Shaun Prescott's work, being deeply engaged with the visceral and rough elementality of the Australian landscape and their shared attempts to make sense of the Australian experience. Prescott contributed the liner notes for Troth's 2020 album Flaws In The Glass, recorded on a residency in Mt Wilson shortly following the devastating bushfires in the area.