A writer questions the architecture of words, struggling to capture his ideas before they are lost; a husband excavating beneath his house becomes mesmerised by silence and disappears in search of solitude; a lighthouse keeper dreams that he is a man dreaming that he is the keeper of a lighthouse. Magnificent in its scope and imagery, David Brooks' mastery of the written word is eclipsed in this thought-provoking collection. Both evocative and experimental, Brooks' stories conjure fragments of memory and time, capturing streetscapes and heartscapes in a mosaic-style splendour. Lyrical and perceptive, brave and illuminating, Napoleon's Roads explores the richness of language and the possibilities of expression, while exemplifying some of the most sophisticated, polished and beautiful contemporary literature in Australia today.
"'Being at the intersection of text and life, theory and poetry, I would have said these stories form the best instance of Australian postmodernism I have encountered to date, if they weren't also suffused with humanity.'"
Aashish Kaul
"'The prose, like the tightrope walker, is death defying, perhaps death enabling. We shift from voice to voice, text to text, absence to absence in lament, ecstasy and that place of which the singer sings by the grave in the mirologia.'"
