Episodi
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The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.
These are the stories that make us who we are.
Lisa Kenway is an Australian writer and anaesthetist. Her debut novel, All You Took From Me, was longlisted for the 2020 Richell Prize
When Clare wakes in a bed in the hospital where she works as an anesthetist she has only questions.
When doctors inform her she was in a car accident, that it took the life of her beloved husband, she realises how much she has lost.
Clare can’t remember a thing about the accident. Why were they on the deserted road? Why was Ray wearing chainmail armour? And why is a towering figure stalking Clare, leaving her threatening warnings?
Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople
Want more great conversations with Australian authors?
Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week.
Get in touch with Andrew and Final Draft. We love to hear about what you’re reading!
Twitter - https://twitter.com/finaldraft2ser
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The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.
These are the stories that make us who we are.
Publisher Mills & Boon are famous, sometimes infamous and definitely synonymous with romance. Their novels are published in more than 150 countries, in over 30 different languages, with a book sold every two seconds, worldwide.
This year Mills & Boon are celebrating their 50th year in Australia (we were their first country outside the UK)
I’m a reader but no expert on romance and so to help me celebrate this literary milestone I’m joined by three Mills & Boon writers Clare Connelly, Ally Blake and Melanie Milburne to talk all things romance.
Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople
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Episodi mancanti?
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Beloved science communicator Dr Karl Kruszelnicki shares with Andrew some incredible takes of how he became the storyteller and communicator he is today!
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The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.
These are the stories that make us who we are.
Jordan Prosser is a writer, filmmaker and performer from Victoria. His short story ‘Eleuterio Cabrera’s Beautiful Game’ won the Peter Carey Short Story Award in 2022. Big Time is his first novel.
In the Free Republic of East Australia where everything is just bonza and we all toe the line because whatareya a tall poppy or something?!
Julian Ferryman’s been summoned home lest he lose his spot on Bass for his band’s sophomore album. Julian’s not returning alone though; he’s seen the world and the FREA doesn’t love outsider perspectives. Julian’s also seen the future courtesy of the new designer drug ‘F’, but once you’ve seen your future, where does that leave your present?
Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople
Want more great conversations with Australian authors?
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Lisa Kenway is an Australian writer and anaesthetist. Her debut novel, All You Took From Me, was longlisted for the 2020 Richell Prize
When Clare wakes in a bed in the hospital where she works as an anesthetist she has only questions.
When doctors inform her she was in a car accident, that it took the life of her beloved husband, she begins to realise how much she has lost. How did it come to this?
Clare can’t remember a thing about the accident. Why were they on the deserted road? Why was Ray wearing chainmail armour?
As Clare struggles to pull her life back together she is tormented by a towering figure, seemingly stalking her and leaving threatening warnings. The hospital is insisting Clare must see a counselor if she wants to return to work, but it's looking to Clare like she’ll need even more drastic measures if she wants to regain her memories before what she has lost comes back to take what is left.
All You Took From Me is a fascinating exploration into memory and identity. Clare embodies the unreliable narrator and the reader is invited along as she tries to discover if she can even trust herself.
The novel traverses Western Sydney and the Blue Mountains so you know I enjoyed seeing my local area represented. The relative and expanse and solitude of the Mountains is used to effect as the story unfolds and we learn what Clare and her husband had been up to in the days and weeks prior to their accident.
As we follow Clare in her confusion, the tension is ratcheted up by the appearance of her mysterious stalker. There is a certain inelegance to the threats that Clare is in no position to ignore. The rising tension increases the stakes to the point that Clare is willing to try some radical, even desperate means to regain her memory and control over her life. What follows is an innovative exploration of memory and how our subconscious feeds into our everyday.
Clare’s journey of self discovery is suitably fraught and makes for an entertaining look into the depths contained within our seemingly everyday lives.
All You Took From Me is an effective thriller and a must read for lovers of Sydney and surrounds. -
The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.
These are the stories that make us who we are.
Evie Wyld is the award winning author of five novels including the 2021 Stella Prize winning The Bass Rock.
Max waits in the London flat he shares with Hannah. He’s had little to do but wait since he died. He’d never given much consideration to being a ghost and even still it’s not living up to the hype.
Max’s non-corporeal existence is giving him a view into all the things Hannah never told him during their relationship though. Her life before, her life in Australia was always closed to him but now there’s a lot that Hannah must grieve.
Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople
Want more great conversations with Australian authors?
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Max Porter is the critically acclaimed author of Grief is the Thing With Feathers and Lanny.
The adults in Shy’s life might describe him as troubled, erratic, violent even. Shy himself doesn’t exactly know why these things keep happening but it’s ended him up in Last Chance, a home for wayward kids, itself on its last legs as developers converge on the property threatening its future.
What does Shy care?! He’s pushed away his mum and his foster dad and now in this haunted old pile he figures he’s not worth much more than a backpack full of stones and a walk to the local pond.
The events of Shy cover a mere few hours of a climactic night in Shy’s life, and yet as he sets out through the window of Last Chance and into the surrounding countryside we are taken on an expansive trip into the confusing and often chaotic world that has brought Shy up to this juncture.
I called Shy’s life chaotic there and it is with style and compassion that Porter brings this chaos onto the page. Both the prose and the typeset veer wildly across the sections evoking thoughts and snatches of conversation. Shy’s confusion and spiraling into the trap of his half realized adolescent life are vividly brought to life even as Shy plods towards a seeming conclusion.
I found the novel both confronting and comforting. Shy is troubled but the novel doesn’t seek to wrap his pain up into a neat bow. The possibility of transformation is elusive and Shy’s fate is a seemingly forgone conclusion; he’s writing himself off as surely as others have written him off.
Shy as ‘angry young man’ let’s you stay angry yourself at the senselessness of angst ridden masculinity whilst also revealing the pathos at its empty core.
This is a slim volume and if you let it, a quick read but the sense that it is reaching for something longer, more tangible is inescapable as you struggle to make sense of the life on the page. -
The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.
These are the stories that make us who we are.
On today's show Tim Ayliffe is in conversation with the indomitable Felix Shannon
"When Sydney socialite Tottie Evans is found dead at a house in Palm Beach, Detective Holly Sutton is called in to investigate. She immediately suspects the boyfriend,a millionaire property developer and ex-mercenary soldier, who refuses to cooperate with police.
Across the city, old-school reporter John Bailey – still haunted by the death of his girlfriend, former cop Sharon Dexter – gets a call about a break-in. It leads to the unearthing of an old case file on a murder at the men-only Sydney Club that Dexter had been pursuing a decade earlier. Her notes reveal a link between that murder and the killing of Tottie Evans.
Suddenly, John Bailey and Holly Sutton have the same mission. And for Bailey, this is a chance to finish a job for the woman who saved his life.
The only problem: a serial killer is already serving a life sentence for the Sydney Club murder."
Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople
Want more great conversations with Australian authors?
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Get your favourite bookish costume ready it's time to celebrate Book Week 17th - 23rd August
Celebrate Book Week with a fresh new read and maybe even get dressed up as your favourite character
CBCA Book of the Year Winners:
Book of the Year: Older Readers
Karen Comer - Grace Notes
Book of the Year: Younger Readers
Tristan Bancks - Scar Town
Book of the Year: Early Childhood
Briony Stewart - Gymnastica Fantastica!
Picture Book of the Year
Kelly Canby - Timeless
Eve Pownall Award
Isolde Martyn & Robyn Ridgeway (text), Louise Hogan (illustrator) - Country Town
CBCA Award for New Illustrator
Erica Wagner (text by Johanna Bell) - Hope is the Thing -
The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.
These are the stories that make us who we are.
Belinda Cranston is a Canberra based writer. She’s joining us today with her first novel, The Changing Room.
Rachel has left Australia and is determined to find herself in the world.
When London fails to offer her the adventures she is seeking, Rachel and a friend travel first to Egypt and then into Israel.
Rachel still feels unsure of herself, but surely somewhere in the world she’ll discover the person she’s meant to be?
Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople
Want more great conversations with Australian authors?
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Evie Wyld is the award winning author of five novels including the 2021 Stella Prize winning The Bass Rock.
Max waits in the London flat he shares with Hannah. He’s had little to do but wait since he died. He’d never given much consideration to being a ghost and even still it’s not living up to the hype.
Max’s non-corporeal existence is giving him a view into all the things Hannah never told him during their relationship though. Her life before, her life in Australia was always closed to him but now there’s a lot that Hannah must grieve.
The hook for Evie Wyld’s new novel works on multiple levels.
For starters Max isn’t a terribly convincing ghost. Early in the novel he confesses that he probably wouldn’t have believed in himself if he weren’t currently the one doing all the haunting.
Max’s existential irony is further compounded when it becomes apparent that this will be something of a mutual haunting. Even as Max tries desperately to harness some kind of spectral energy to reach out to Hannah he will discover aspects of their shared life together that he was unaware of.
The power of stories; told and hidden lies at the heart of The Echoes.
Hannah and Max have built their life together after Hannah fled her old life and her family back in Australia. Kept afloat by a photo of a grandmother she barely knew, taken in front of a house on a London street, Hannah will seek to escape into a life she feels she might have had were it not for the unfortunate circumstance of migration.
Hannah feels her life could have been better had her family never moved to The Echoes. Their story plays out on land that was once a so-called school for Aboriginal children. When Hannah was growing up she learned the euphemisms but now she appreciates they were stolen from their families.
Their stories haunt the land untold even as Hannah’s stories haunt the apartment she shared with Max.
The Echoes is masterfully told over alternating chapters of then and now.
Max’s impotent haunting skates painfully close to our collective experience of lockdown (much of the novel was written while Wyld was in London lockdown with her partner) and as such Max’s experiences wax and wane between the tragic and the hilarious.
There is something for all of us in Max’s pent up navel gazing and engrossing study of the local spider. He is at times hapless and at others haughty; a foil to the other men who have occupied Hannah’s life.
The men of the novel are better at causing pain than witnessing it. Much like the ground where Hannah grew up there is more buried than the surface might suggest.
Hannah’s story is one of loss and reconciliation. Where Max is confined to the apartment she is stuck in the life she lived in Australia and how her attempts to escape it prevent her from ever reconciling with herself.
Wyld’s prose allows the reader to occupy this space with Hannah and Max, feeling both their loves and losses. An apartment’s not a large space but Wyld fills it with the lives that fill it and this transports the reader out across time and the world.
The Echoes is a novel about trauma and the ways we deal with or avoid it. As she did in The Bass Rock, Wyld reminds us that we are not alone in time but that we must look to the stories that have come before us to understand our place. -
The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.
These are the stories that make us who we are.
Patrick Holland is a novelist and short story writer. He is the author of seven books, most notably The Mary Smokes Boys (2010), which was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award.
Patrick’s new novel is Oblivion.
In a bar that wouldn’t let you in, sit men you can’t afford to drink with. These men make the deals that shape our world.
One such man is on the make. He’s seeking a fortune that will allow him to escape and is conscious that this is not a game for old men.
A few more months and he might escape into his own oblivion.
Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople
Want more great conversations with Australian authors?
Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.
Get in touch with Andrew and Final Draft. We love to hear about what you’re reading!
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Jordan Prosser is a writer, filmmaker and performer from Victoria. His short story ‘Eleuterio Cabrera’s Beautiful Game’ won the Peter Carey Short Story Award in 2022. Big Time is his first novel.
In the Free Republic of East Australiaeverything is just bonza. The people toe the line because nobody likes a tall poppy and the threat of indefinite detention is too real to tempt fate.
Music helps to keep the population placated and no one does it better than The Acceptables. Their first album Artificial Beaches on Every Mountain, Artificial Mountains on Every Beach launched them into the public consciousness and now Julian Ferryman’s been summoned home lest he lose his spot on Bass for the band’s sophomore album.
Julian’s been travelling outside the tightly controlled borders of the FREA and he’s not returning alone though; he’s seen the world and the FREA doesn’t love outsider perspectives. Julian’s also seen the future courtesy of the new designer drug ‘F’, but once you’ve seen your future, where does that leave your present?
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Big Time is a wild ride into a fascist dystopian future where everybody is tightly monitored but seems ok with it if it keeps the peace.
The Acceptables made good in this climate with their crowd pleasing debut but now they have to face up to sophomore album syndrome. Julian would love to just keep the public happy but lead singer Ash has other ideas. He’s got dreams of being a rock’n’roll messiah but seems to have forgotten how that story ended.
As the band enters their recording sessions the only thing keeping Julian going is looking into his future on ‘F’. These glimpses of his soon-to-be keep him calm. Nothing can surprise him and so he just lets life happen.
But ‘F’ isn’t just some benign vision of the future. People are tripping forward past their own deaths and all around the world an epidemic of coincidences make it seem like time has run out and is starting to repeat on itself.
It’s almost impossible to not make pithy comparisons to try and sum up Big Time. My best effort is Aldous Huxley writing Almost Famous as directed by David Lynch. I think the comparisons are a way of trying to grasp the originality and throw a blanket over the wild ideas long enough to try and wrap your mind around them.
At its heart this is a story about art and how it might just be our salvation, if we can truly embrace it and not just brush over its surface.
Stylistically the novel weaves throughout this future imperfect at a satisfyingly breakneck pace. Counternarratives weave through The Acceptable story building towards a dark horizon. Just as you start to think you can hum along to the tunes on the Acceptables new album, the bands about to go full Rumours and we find ourselves getting a little road trip freedom fighter and pulls the rug out again.
There’s a lot of buzz around Big Time and I have to agree that there’s something to hype here. Jordan Prosser has created a narrative that feels like it's talking to our era whilst also fizzing with an energy of a different time. The story is punchy and the characters as frustratingly real to the point that you’ll be rooting for them even when they start to annoy you with their poor decisions.
Hard recommend from me for Big Time. This is one I’d like to hear more from. -
The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.
These are the stories that make us who we are.
Alice Robinson is the author of Anchor Point, which was longlisted for the Stella Prize and the Indie Book Awards and The Glad Shout, winner of the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction.
Her new novel is If You Go.
Esther awakens in a strange room.
Strapped to a table, hooked up to machines and with a breathing tube down her throat, Esther has no memory of what this place is and how she got here.
As the days pass Esther is attended by a single woman. Grace is attentive but Esther is in no mood for mystery and in her disoriented state she struggles to understand her situation.
Where are her children and how did she get here?
As her strength returns Esther searches her memory and latches onto a singular mission; that she must get out and find her kids.
Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople
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Patrick Holland is a novelist and short story writer. He is the author of seven books, most notably The Mary Smokes Boys (2010), which was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award.
Patrick’s new novel is Oblivion.
In a bar that wouldn’t let you in, sit men you can’t afford to drink with. These men make the deals that shape our world.
One such man is on the make. He’s seeking a fortune that will allow him to escape and is conscious that this is not a game for old men. If he can survive a few more months, he might just be able to escape into his own oblivion.
…
Oblivion transports the reader into a world far above the everyday. We follow an unnamed protagonist as he moves throughout the one percent brokering the sort of deals that make the world turn.
The story opens into a whirlwind of airports and bars as we follow our man from one business meeting to the next. Our hero, if he is in fact the hero, lives in these liminal spaces where he can meet with the influential and this disappears to the next occasion.
The settings are lavish and the movers and shakers are aware of their privilege.
As we come to know our man, although never his name, we discover that he is on a personal mission of deliverance. The power wielded by those around is not so attractive as it is a means to disconnect. He is looking to make money fast and then get out. From the sleepless nights and the drugs and booze, he is looking for his own personal oblivion.
This demi-monde of powerful people offers access at all levels and our man has his official face as well as his scams. When he is manipulated into a government mission on the same day he meets the most beautiful woman he can imagine it becomes certain that loyalties will be tested.
Oblivion is a stylish novel with a heart.
I’ve drawn a picture of a pacy thriller and that is certainly in there, but the novel also concerns itself with why we do what we do. From the outset the reader's eyes are drawn to the sky. To the semi-charmed world of high flyers who feel they cannot be touched. In this world where anything (it seems) is possible there is a tangible unease in our protagonist's mind. We quickly learn he is not planning on growing old and so it is even more enthralling when is drawn into attachments.
The pace of the plotting is juxtaposed with the interior world of a man who isn’t sure if any of it matters. As we meet other’s convictions our protagonist deftly sidesteps offering anything so gauche as an opinion.
But in trying to opt out he is vulnerable to being caught by something that might truly matter to him.
Oblivion is a treat with its sumptuous locations and for the balance it strikes being international espionage and matters of our interior world.
Come for the cocktails but stay for the conversation. Oblivion is a novel of ideas with an edge. -
The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.
These are the stories that make us who we are.
Deborah Callahan has had a distinguished career in publishing working as a publicist, a publisher, and a literary agent.
Audrey Mendes knows she’s got talent, so why can’t anyone else see it?
Audrey’s the rock everyone else seems to be building their success on and that’s just not enough for her anymore. Whether it’s at the law firm where she works, in her love life, even the trivia team she plays with each week, everyone tells her she’s funny and then moves on to the next, more interesting thing.
It’s not nice being invisible but there’s also a lot you can get away with when no one’s looking.
Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople
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The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.
These are the stories that make us who we are.
Susannah Begbie grew up in rural New South Wales on a sheep farm and is now a GP who has worked all over Australia. She is the winner of Hachette's Richell Prize for 2022. The Deed is her first novel.
Tom Edwards has spent most of his life running the farm by himself. He’s not well pleased that his kids never came back to take their place on the land as he wanted.
Tom’s also dying and so he’s come up with a plan.
His kids will return to the farm and build him a coffin, in four days no less. They’ll build him a coffin and they’ll do it right, or he’ll disinherit the lot of them.
Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople
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Alice Robinson is the author of Anchor Point, which was longlisted for the Stella Prize and the Indie Book Awards and The Glad Shout, winner of the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction.
Her new novel is If You Go.
Esther awakens in a strange room.
Strapped to a table, hooked up to machines and with a breathing tube down her throat, Esther has no memory of what this place is and how she got here.
As the days pass Esther is attended by a single woman. Grace is attentive but Esther is in no mood for mystery and in her disoriented state she struggles to understand her situation.
Where are her children and how did she get here?
As her strength returns Esther searches her memory and latches onto a singular mission; that she must get out and find her kids.
Alice Robinson’s If You Go is a gripping, heart wrenching novel.
I’m really only setting up the beginning of the book there with my intro, and I’m going to be very careful how I proceed because If You Go packs one hell of a surprise for the reader.
The narrative follows Esther as she slowly orients herself to her strange surroundings and her mysterious carer Grace. Most difficult of all for Esther is that she cannot recall how she came to be in the strange place and struggles to recall the last moments of her life before awakening.
Esther is driven by an overwhelming urge to remember herself and return to her children. While she does not know her fate she is certain it cannot be good and she knows her kids will need her. This leads to her treating Grace with hostility, certain that there is something she is holding back; a secret to the strange building and Esther’s fate.
If You Go is concerned with the relationship between mothers and their children.
Esther wakes with an overwhelming urge to find and protect her children, even as she finds herself reduced to the state of a child. She is completely at Grace’s mercy, not only for physical support but for a sense of orientation to her world.
Esther's vulnerability compels her to look back on her own jet-setting mother. Vivienne was formidable both in her presence and in her absence. This relationship in turn sets the stage for what Esther believes she might achieve with her own children.
As Esther pours over her past searching for a clue to her current fate she also looks for clues about how these relationships shaped her. Nagging at the back of her mind is the complete absence of family. No one has come to visit her and she wonders at how she became the person who could be abandoned.
I’m going to wind up the thematic discussion here and go back to referring obliquely to the incredible progress of the novel (that I just can't spoil here). Robinson deftly weaves Esther’s past and future into a rich evocation of families in all their messy glory.
Such is our immersion in Esther’s life you’ll forgive yourself if you are completely blindsided when revelation after revelation shows you this is not the world you thought it was.
If You Go is a powerful look at motherhood and family that shows us how a sense of belonging can carry us through so much and it’s absence is utterly devastating.
Loved this review?
You can get more books, writing and literary culture every week on the Final Draft Great Conversations podcast. Hear interviews with authors and discover your next favourite read!
Book Club is produced and presented by Andrew Pople
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The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.These are the stories that make us who we are.Jenna Lo Bianco is a writer, teacher and Italophile. Her debut novel The Italian Marriage came out in 2023 with Pan Macmillan, part of a three book deal. Today Jenna joins us with her latest; Love & Rome.When Stella Chiaro left Australia for the Eternal City, Rome it was always going to be all or nothing. Stella escaped a toxic relationship determined to never let anyone diminish her light again.Now Stella’s on a deadline. Find a job in the arts by April 2nd or its back home to Australia.She’s firm. Nothing can dissuade her. Especially not a handsome bar owner, and definitely not a brooding photographer…Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew PopleWant more great conversations with Australian authors?Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.Get in touch with Andrew and Final Draft. We love to hear about what you’re reading!Twitter - https://twitter.com/finaldraft2ser Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/finaldraft2ser/ Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/finaldraft2ser/
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Siang Lu is the author of The Whitewash, a tremendous mockumentary style exploration of the movie industry, which won an ABIA for best Audiobook. Siang is also the co-creator of The Beige Index, your definitive guide to how white your movie viewing really.
Siang’s new novel is Ghost Cities.
Xiang is working as a translator at Sydney’s Chinese Consulate when it’s discovered he really doesn’t speak much Chinese. This is considered a less than desirable outcome and Xiang is both fired and culturally shamed for his lack of national pride.
If that wasn’t insult enough Xiang soon discovers he is going viral in mainland China as the #BadChinese. Something of a cultural parody of the diaspora population. His digital notoriety sees him drawn into the orbit of the megalomaniacal director/entrepreneur Baby Bao.
Xiang is quickly whisked off to the Ghost City of Port Man Tou, where he is set to star in the city wide production of Baby Bao’s simulation of reality. A movie within a city within a movie that is aiming to create an economy so circular it might just get vertigo.
Siang Lu’s debut The Whitewash set the stage for his flair for cultural observation and a shrewd type of observational humour that honestly reminded me of the late great Terry Pratchett.
Xiang is a kind of everyman who is constantly off-balance in the funhouse mirror world of Baby Bao, who is himself a chimeric beast of modern globalist enterprise.
Now if this isn’t enough Ghost Cities establishes that the whole enterprise of Port Man Tou is a strange echo of a far distant Emperor and his quest to build a city and a dynasty that will carry his legacy into perpetuity.
Ghost Cities is a novel that offers many rewards for both the casual or the committed reader. Lu’s writing is effortlessly clever and glides from misadventure to catastrophe, challenging the reader to root for both Xiang and Baby Bao despite their clearly being at odds (and Baby Bao truly seeming like a monster). This reading easily offers up the kind of blockbuster Baby Bao would love to make.
In the paralleled storylines, the clever mix of language and the intricately woven plotting we can also find a intellectually stimulating read; a kind of arthouse cinema for the soul that equally Baby Bao would also like to make (I mean he has taken over a whole city and is simultaneously filming all its inhabitants to film multiple movies at once).
Ghost Cities is a marvel and beyond all that just tremendously fun to read.
Go check out Ghost Cities from Siang Lu.
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