Lunation is a literary thriller set in a world where truth, fiction and character are merging and unstable.

Lunation is a literary thriller set in a world where truth, fiction and character are merging and unstable. It takes the reader into an underworld of Government censorship, madness, fear and sex. Lunation is about the erotic relationship between a reader and writer. It asks you, the Reader, to get into bed with the Writer and breathe in the danger of that union.

Isabella Luce is a Sydney journalist put under surveillance by the Howard Government for trying to tell the story of Luna, a young girl from Basra who is detained. The novel charts Isabella’s subsequent psychic disintegration, taking the reader on a paranoid journey into the confined mind and the stories that haunt that mind. It is also a love story about a scared girl seeking a mother and a lonely woman seeking a daughter. It is about the importance of real connections in a cold, new disposable world where love and sex are found online and thrown away as quickly as possible.

Lunation is told in frames of points of view, prose, documentary, afterimages and poetry and fragments into ghost stories of ‘mad women’ such as Zelda Fitzgerald, Yoko Ono, Sylvia Plath and Janet Frame. The ghosts that inhabit the walls of prisons, literature and the mind vie for attention in a hurly-burly of urgent narrative reminiscent of Milan Kundera, Jeanette Winterson or Michael Ondaatje.

Lunation asks the reader to explore the edges of the information we are given and the greyness between fiction and fact. It is the story of a mad nation, complicit in crimes by remaining willingly ignorant and accepting the printed word as truth. It is about the stories we tell ourselves to feel free and asks if freedom is possible.