Two siblings traverse the southern island to try to find their way back to each other in this tale about grief and love and the bonds of family.
Robbie Arnott was born in Launceston in 1989. His writing has appeared in Island, the Lifted Brow, Kill Your Darlings and the 2017 anthology Seven Stories. He won the 2015 Tasmanian Young Writers' Fellowship and the 2014 Scribe Nonfiction Prize for Young Writers. Robbie lives in Hobart and is an advertising copywriter.
‘A strange and joyous marvel.’
*Richard Flanagan*
‘Ambitious storytelling from a stunning new Australian voice.
Flames is constantly surprising—I never knew where the story would
take me next. This book has a lovely sense of wonder for the world.
It’s brimming with heart and compassion.’
*Rohan Wilson*
‘Robbie Arnott is a vivid and bold new voice in Australian
fiction.’
*Danielle Wood*
‘Visionary, vivid, full of audacious transformations: there’s a
marvellous energy to this writing that returns the world to us
aflame. A brilliant and wholly original debut.’
*Gail Jones*
‘Arnott skilfully switches between different voices and genres in a
trick reminiscent of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. The range he
displays is impressive, swinging from fable to gothic horror to
hardboiled detective story.’
*Books+Publishing*
‘Flames is an exuberantly creative and confident debut. This is a
story that sparks with invention…Invigorating, strange and
occasionally brutal.’
*Australian Book Review*
‘This is the kind of book that you’ll be able to read a second,
third, even fourth time, and it will still never reveal all its
secrets. Composed with meticulous attention to detail, and a
mastery of form rarely found in a debut novel, Flames will keep you
stewing long after you’ve finished reading it.’
*Readings*
'A surprising story with a definite feminist edge…the novel’s
playfulness and poetry make for a fresh and entertaining read.'
*Saturday Paper*
‘Arnott confidently borrows from the genres of crime fiction,
thriller, romance, comedy, eco-literature, and magical realism,
throws them in the air, and lets the pieces land to form a flaming
new world.’
*Sydney Morning Herald*
‘This is a startlingly good first novel, stylistically adventurous,
gorgeous in its descriptions and with a compelling narrative that
should find a wide readership.’
*Australian*
‘A gloriously audacious book. It runs astonishing risks and takes
on the biggest emotions…It bowled me sideways.’
*New Zealand Herald*
‘Unique and memorable…Extraordinary energy…A rich and
memorable picture with prose of an exceptionally high
quality. You won’t read another Australian literary novel like
this anytime soon.’
*Kill Your Darlings*
‘[A] novel you will want to read more than once, not so much to
plumb its depths as to savour its wild variety of styles and
voices, to revel in its breathtaking descriptions of Tasmanian
wilderness and to grasp its intricate structure…There is no doubt
that a poetically wild and wicked imagination is at work here. More
please!’
*SA Weekend*
‘It's not hard to see where the hype came from. This is an assured,
funny and highly imaginative work. Flames is strange from
the first, arresting sentence.’
*Stuff NZ*
‘Highly innovative…[A] finely built and realised first novel.’
*Otago Daily Times*
‘Flames is brilliant…Enjoy it for its prose poetry, its vivid
imagery, its brilliant turns of phrase on nearly every page.’
*NZ Listener*
‘Delightful. He jumps playfully between different writing styles in
every chapter…[An] enchanting story that also captures something
very real about Tasmanian life.’
*Guardian*
‘An engrossing narrative of mystery and escape that treats the
reader to bravura runs of writing, especially around the elements
of water and fire...You never quite know which direction the story
will take off in as it creates a new kind of fairytale for our
fire-prone landscape.’
*Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist 2019*
‘Solid, significant and emotionally resonant...Arnott is especially
good at conjuring the fragile, changeable environment of
Tasmania...By the end, it felt less like Arnott was imbuing his
local landscape with magic, and more that the landscape itself was
lending his book some of its strange and special power.'
*Guardian UK*
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