Drylands

Winner, Miles Franklin Award, 1999
Winner, QLD Premier's Literary Awards, Fiction, 2000

This will be a book for the worlds last reader, she decided, chewing pen-end over an open exercise book.

In the dying town of Drylands, Janet Deakin sells papers to lonely locals. At night, in her flat above the newsagency, she attempts to write a novel for a world in which no one readsfull of people, she envisaged, glaring at a screen that glared glassily back.

Drylands is the story of the townsfolks harsh, violent lives. Trenchant and brilliant, Thea Astleys final novel is a dark portrait of outback Australia in decline.