In his brilliant new novel, Michael Meehan, the acclaimed author of The Salt of Broken Tears,offers a lyrical, often blackly comic retelling of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.In a tiny town in the Australian countryside of northwest Victoria in 1955, the year before the introduction of the television will spell the end to their way of life, a troupe of makeshift vaudeville artists arrives to give a performance. Over the course of a day of interminable rain, we are drawn into their world as they prepare for the show and engage with the locals, discovering their banal secrets and conjuring buried dreams in this remote, water-filled landscape.

Among the players is the Prospero-like compere, endlessly scribbling and patiently shoring up the psyches of his troupe; Balt, who carries the luggage and the props, as well as a burden of silence and sadness; and Mrs. Barrington, a weeping, middle-aged soprano, whose voice is fading but who, in one magic moment, might again find the haunting truth of her young self. Ceaselessly devising pranks that threaten the success of the performance is the mischievous, swamp-dwelling rabbiter, whose obsession, a pale English girl with a saxophone, becomes a new Ariel. They each, whether showman or rustic, have their own stories--of illusions fostered and shattered, desires met and denied--and their own particular revelation in the course of Meehan's eloquent and beautifully descriptive narrative. Yet as diverse as they may be, they are bound together this one evening by the transformative power of art.

In this award-winning novel, Michael Meehan's "imagination of another order" (The Australian)finds new voice and again proves him to be a writer of refreshing originality.