The Finley Confession: Winner of the Proverse Prize 2020

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In 2010 two septuagenarians reminisce on a balcony overlooking a former town and river valley inundated fifty years before by the damned waters of the massive Snowy Mountain Scheme. One of them, Ralph McDonald, feels compelled to retell dramatic events from his youth, ones related to things hidden in the depths of his conscience and in the waters themselves. An unlikely trio of late teenagers-the scion of Australian landed gentry, the brilliant son of middle-class Canberra academics, and the humble son of the local garage owner-together spend uncomplicated school holidays until the catalytic arrival of two individuals: an intense half Aboriginal boy who inhabits his deceased grandmother's shack, and a singer from a distant world of glamour appearing for the winter season at the only major ski lodge in the surrounding national park. As the confession reveals, little by little, the trio-seemingly the embodiment of the Australian egalitarian myth of mateship-is poisoned by snobbery, vindictiveness, complex sexualities, deception and, above all, interpersonal exploitation. Working through an amalgam of literary genres (bildungsroman, mystery tale, and the historic novel) THE FINLEY CONFESSION is a critical account of race, class and gender in contemporary Australia, but it also brings into question who owns any story and why. "Highly readable and thoroughly entertaining... a writerly novel, calling into question the very authority of any teller of tales." >"The novel perfectly captures the Snowy Mountains of the 1960s... a coming-of-age story of great power and intensity as the narrator finds himself torn between two classes, two races... and two loves. At times matter-of-fact and conversational, at other times, laced with lyrical beauty and wry observation." -A.J. Mackinnon, author of The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow and The Well at the World's End. "With poetic aplomb and a fondness for frank and unsettling insights, The Finley Confessions plumbs a lost Australian landscape to sound the depths of fractured masculinity.">