It was only possible to see the full extent of the town if you spent many years there. Only then could you see the barriers shimmer at its edges, and know what the edges meant. A radio station broadcasts tapes to an audience of none; an ex-musician drives a bus that no-one ever boards; a publican runs an empty hotel with no patrons. When a writer arrives in this New South Wales town to research vanishing Australian settlements, he is plunged into an abyss of weirdness from which he - and the town itself - might never recover. An uncanny masterpiece, Shaun Prescott's debut novel The Town is a stunning reincarnation of the existentialist novel and a haunting excavation of historical trauma. Magnetic, strange, and absurdly slippery, this is a portrait of oblivion from Australia's answer to Lynch, Calvino, and Kafka.