When A Monkey Speaks

Damian Sharp's rich, hypnotic stories explore the harsh, but often beautiful and mystifying, effects of the Australian bush on those who live there. With a gift for evoking this rough scrub country, Sharp transports the reader into the land of relentless sun, red sand deserts, and rushing muddy rivers of his own youth. His characters inhabit this rugged landscape graced by kangaroos, screeching cockatoos, ants that derail trains, and great goannas. Admirably bold, and blindly determined, these men and women confront themselves as they struggle to deal with issues of race, desire, family, and destiny. Larger than life, yet dwarfed by their dramatic surroundings, they are people whose passionate lives are punctuated by reckless acts of violence and of love. Ena, angrily inhabiting the faded rooms of an abandoned farmhouse, is visited by the persistent ghosts of her many departed lovers. A young boy befriends his father's hired band and learns the violent secret of the aborigine's rite of passage. Two quarrelsome traveling companions wrestle with love and infidelity while crossing the Simpson Desert. An American woman, sent in to investigate a suspected Nazi, has a mystifying encounter in the bush. A father and son test the limits of a strained relationship shadowed by an unspoken past. In a dusty shantytown an old woman lies dying, and Alan Bedford, witness for his father, finally learns the tale of the legendary Big Flo and the Flying Kangaroo.