Wood Green

Shortlisted for The Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction in 2016

Would-be novelist Michael Pollard disembarks from a flight where he has been fantasising about his death into an equally surreal life in the small town of Wood Green, as secretary to the reclusive author Lucian Clarke. What starts as a straightforward task of collecting facts about his life for an autobiography descends into the strange as his employer's behaviour becomes increasingly erratic.

It soon becomes clear to Michael that the facts of a man's life can add up to not knowing him at all, and the lives of the two men intertwine beyond the realms of the literary into the bizarre. Sean Rabin's Wood Green is an unsettling tale about the metamorphosis of two writers in a place where the boundaries of reality don't just blur, but collide.

'At once a brilliantly sustained comic performance, an anatomy of a small community halfway up a brooding mountainside, an imagining of the human costs of making fiction and their human costs.' Sydney Morning Herald

'Wood Green is a Chinese box of a novel, an exploration of the friction between realism and the surreal, between style and function, and the other attendant questions that a writer must ask before putting pen to paper.' The Australian