In keeping with his successful début fiction, Shaun Prescott’s Bon and Lesley is set in a declining regional Australian town filled with oddball characters and plagued by otherworldly phenomena. The Town (2017) was published in seven countries and garnered apt comparison to, among others, Franz Kafka and László Krasznahorkai, as well as Australian writers Gerald Murnane and Wayne Macauley. Like these influences, Prescott’s work eludes definitive categorisation, though his second novel maintains distinctly ontological and surrealist emphases.

It is fitting then that Bon and Lesley begins with the fulfilment of a dream. The titular Bon disembarks at Newnes train station, a random stop in New South Wales that for years he has imagined visiting on his daily commute between Sydney (where he lives) and the Central West (where he works). There is nothing particularly appealing about this ‘ugly and unfussy town’, and it is not an ideal time for a spot of tourism. Although it is the middle of autumn, bushfires still rage in the mountains that separate Newnes from the city, and Bon is stranded for the night when the fires cause the trains to be cancelled. This mundane visit to a dead-end town becomes more daring when, after an evening spent drinking with local larrikin Steven Grady, Bon elects to stay for good. Phone wiped and SIM card discarded, Bon swiftly abandons his job and his life in Sydney, surrendering himself to chance and spontaneity by moving in with the voluble Steven. Within a month, the titular Lesley (a stranger to the town and to Bon) will arrive in almost identical circumstances.