Pink Mountain on Locust Island

Longlisted for the 2019 Stella Prize

Shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2019 for The UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing

Shortlisted for the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction

Winner of the 2018 Melbourne Prize for Literature’s Readings

Shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal 2019

Jamie Marina Lau is one of Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelists 2019

An unpredictable and innovative debut novel from a provocative new voice in Australian fiction. Embracing the noir tradition and featuring a prose style quite unlike any before, with references that will go both over your head and under your feet, Pink Mountain on Locust Island will flip readers upside down and turn your understanding of the world around around. Modernity, art, family, gender, drugs, music, adolescence, business, religion, internet cafes, food, strangers, aesthetics, vacations, fashion, desires, dreams, expectations, brown couches.

Pink Mountain on Locust Island is:

a) a subterranean noir of the most electronic generation - the pinkwhite bursts of a teenaged nomad;

b) a fizzing of the New Wave underground art province, with its melting pot of noise bands and Phife, amnesiac and digitalised bossa novas, and art installations about art installations;

c) a 24-hour yank between pulverised English, elastic Cantonese and the newest, digitalised dialect of transcultural landscapes;

d) a short novel narrated among the lumps of Monk's daydreams, her violent, claustrophobic encounters, and her staccato movements through a hyperreal pop culture world that could only belong to our 21st century;

e) all of the above.

Monk lives in Chinatown with her washed-up painter father. When Santa Coy - possible boyfriend, potential accomplice - enters their lives, an intoxicating hunger consumes their home. So begins a heady descent into art, casino resorts, drugs, vacant swimming pools, religion, pixelated tutorial videos, and senseless violence.

In bursts of fizzing, staccato and claustrophobic prose, this modern Australian take on the classic hard-boiled novel bounces you between pulverised English, elastic Cantonese and the new dialect of a digitised world.

Tip over into a subterranean noir of the most electronic generation.