White Body of Evening by A L McCann

'Madness and the nature of creativity are at the heart of A.L. McCann's first novel. A highly engaging read' - Courier Mail. Melbourne in the 1890s: a city of respectable facades concealing a twilight world of sexual misadventure. As the marriage of Albert and Anna Walters degenerates into brutal farce, their children, Paul and Ondine, are exposed to the city's lurid possibilities. In the new century Ondine takes after her mother and wrestles with repressive social convention, while Paul's artistic aspirations plunge him into an underworld of poets, prostitutes and false prophets. Slowly his father's strange legacy unfolds, and in spectacular fashion Paul's thwarted ambition drives him from the emerging Antipodes to the decadence of Vienna, and to a final, precarious homecoming, where creative inspiration slides closer to madness and murder... By turns thought-provoking, chilling and blackly comic, the White Body of Evening is a remarkable debut. 'Compelling and satisfying ... black, sometimes bleak, but very readable' - Australian Book Review.