Firelight
John Morrissey
An imprisoned man with strange visions writes letters to his sister.
A controversial business tycoon leaves his daughter a mysterious inheritance.
A child is haunted by a green man with a message about the origins of their planet.
In this striking collection of stories, the award-winning John Morrissey investigates colonialism and identity without ever losing sight of his characters’ humanity. Brilliantly imagined and masterfully observed, Firelight marks the debut of a writer we will be reading for decades to come.
‘Here is a sharp and compelling new voice in Australian fiction. Morrissey honours his characters, and his writing is at once lucid and poetic, meticulous and economical. I read Firelight breathlessly.’
‘An exemplary collection of Indigenous literary speculative fiction. [Firelight] engages with both a sense of wonderment and our innate capacity for compassion, wonderful and abstracted at turns, often simultaneously. Literary spec-fit is a genre to which Aboriginal people seem well suited, for a number of reasons; one of them is that Aboriginal literature is constantly and instinctively engaged with the fantastical. Morrissey’s stories, those of a new writer stretching his mind and experimenting with form, demonstrate that perfectly.’
‘Morrissey is showing his prowess in working in speculative fiction.’
- Awards
-
Winner, Best Collection Aurealis Awards, 2024
- Release
- Aug-2023
- ISBN
- 9781922790378
- RRP (AUD)
- $32.99
- Pages
- 256
- Format
- Paperback & ebook
- Category
- Fiction
John Morrissey
John Morrissey is a Melbourne writer of Kalkadoon descent. His work has been published in Overland, Voiceworks, Meanjin and the anthology This All Come Back Now. He was the winner of the 2020 Boundless Mentorship and the runner-up for the 2018 Nakata Brophy Prize.
Text Publishing
Text Publishing is an independent, Melbourne-based publisher of literary and commercial fiction and non-fiction. Text has been awarded the ABIA Small Publisher of the Year three times and won the Leading Edge Books Small Publisher of the Year in 2018 and 2019.
