New Year's Eve, 1989. At a residential care home in suburban Australia, fireworks explode in the distance while an elderly man dies in troubling circumstances. Decades later, a proof-reader, disfigured by a childhood accident, prepares to meet a celebrated and reclusive novelist. Between these two figures a subtle and intricate web is woven, implicating the members of a mystical cult, the victim of a beheading, an impostor artist, and the enigmatic presence known only as Agent Vell.
Hang Him When He Is Not There is a novel unlike any other. With keen intelligence, stylistic flair, and a bold philosophy of literary possibilities, Nicholas John Turner has crafted a globe-spanning, time-bending narrative that throws its own readers into the action and scours the darkest reaches of the human psyche: jealousy, betrayal, duplicity, cowardice, and -- above all -- vanity.
Truly original and daring.
Luke Stegeman
author of The Beautiful Obscure
One of the boldest Australian literary débuts of recent years. ... Intricately patterned, intertextual, reflexive, multivocal, bleakly mordant... a narrative splayed and atomised, yet strung together by tangling motifs and voices; a fiction that forks in multiple directions before coiling back together in a snake-like constriction; [a novel that] doubles and fractures the shards of narrative until the whole comes to resemble a mirror that has been smashed and then imperfectly restored.
Shannon Burns
The Weekend Australian
Darkly humorous, impish, elusive, and intimate. ... A fresh, electrifying, perplexing, flamboyant cornucopia of self-reflexive text.
Eugene Bacon
Antic Magazine
Smart and playful. ... A curious book that will get you thinking and feeling.
Daniel Young
Tincture
Intricate and subtly interwoven. Hang Him When He Is Not There is not a safe first work of fiction. Rather, it takes risks and challenges conventions masterfully.
Bonnie Stevens
Mous Magazine
Intellectually playful. ... Keeps readers enthralled with [its] deep complexity and originality.
Kim Hellberg
The West End Magazine
Highly original and complex. ... Elusively intriguing. ... There is a fascinating mind to be discovered within these pages.
Elaine Fry
The West Australian
A dazzling, daring novel. I was completely taken aback. The inten-sity of the reading experience it affords is simply astonishing.
Martin Shaw
The Books Desk
Exceptional and challenging. ... One of those books that turns our preconceptions of literature inside-out and expands the limits of what the artform can do. ... When I read it, it gave me that feeling of a first encounter with a truly singular intelligence. Unique. Uncompromising. Absolutely self-possessed, fully confident in the integrity of its one-of-a-kind literary vision. It is the real deal--a novel that offers all the rewards of the very best literature while also breaking all the old rules.
Daniel Davis Wood
author of Blood and Bone
