An Item from the Late News
First edition
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| Author | Thea Astley |
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| Country | Australia |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | University of Queensland Press, Australia |
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Publication date
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1982 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback and Paperback) |
| Pages | 200 |
| ISBN | |
| Preceded by | A Kindness Cup |
| Followed by | Beachmasters |
An Item from the Late News (1982) is a novel by Australian author Thea Astley.
The narrator here is arch, sarcastic, oblique Gabby, a painter who, in reaction against her boring upper-middle family, has been through marriage, affairs, bohemianism, and a breakdown..Now, back in her home-town of Allbut, a former mining center that's become a near-ghost town ""in our continental funkerama,"" Gabby is oddly entranced by a newcomer named Wafer--an overage hippie whose only goal is to find ""the perfect bomb shelter."" (His father was a WW II bomb fatality; he's obsessed with Hiroshima.) But Wafer's quiet quest on the town's outskirts will be doomed--by the town's greed and hypocrisy and violence, by Gabby's own self-involved apathy: Wafer is terrorized by a local macho-thug; his fatherly affection for a teenage girl (the thug's rape victim) is used against him. And when Wafer happens to find a precious stone on one of his wanderings, the town will stop at nothing to learn the location of this possible new gem-lode. . . with a predictably fatal outcome.
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