JANETTE TURNER HOSPITALOysterJanette Turner Hospital has been called by the Times Literary Supplement "one of the most powerful and innovative writers in English today." Oyster has received critical acclaim internationally, and was short-listed for the prestigious Miles Franklin Award and the National Book Award in Australia.Outer Maroo, a small, opal mining town in the Australian outback, is stewing in heat, drought, and guilty anxiety. Some ghastly cataclysm has occurred on the opal fields, but this is a taboo subject. At the heart of the mystery is the cult messiah, Oyster, dressed in white, sexually compelling, and preaching the end of time. "Echoes of Waco, Heaven's Gate, and Jonestown combine with intimations of apocalypse in a stunningly evocative story. . . . A deep and harrowing journey through a desolate land into the recesses of the soul and then back into the light, all recorded in luminous prose." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "An ominous, elegant jewel of a book." — Washington Post "The mad Oyster, dead before the narrative begins, and the hate-filled mining town, dead as the last page turns, have their own bitter, brilliant reality in this impressive novel." — Time "Suspenseful, heart-tugging and profoundly beautiful." — Newsday "Janette Turner Hospital writes with brilliance and originality, evoking a suffocating, shimmering, heat-and-dust filled landscape where truth is distorted as if viewed in a cracked mirror." — People
Janette Turner Hospital is Australian and lives in Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Dislocations, also available from Norton. |
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1999 / paperback / ISBN 0-393-31936-9 1998 / hardcover / ISBN 0-393-04618-4 408 pages / FICTION | ||||||
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