Extinctions

WINNER of the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2017 He hated the word retirement, but not as much as he hated the word village, as if ageing made you a peasant or a fool. Herein lives the village idiot. Professor Frederick Lothian, retired engineer, world expert on concrete and connoisseur of modernist design, has quarantined himself from life by moving to a retirement village. His wife, Martha, is dead and his two adult children are lost to him in their own ways. Surrounded and obstructed by the debris of his life objects he has collected over many years and tells himself he is keeping for his daughter he is determined to be miserable, but is tired of his existence and of the life he has chosen. Humorous, poignant and galvanising by turns, Extinctions is a novel about all kinds of extinction natural, racial, national and personal and what we can do to prevent them.