Inside

A thrilling and powerful new novel from the widely admired Kenneth Harvey.

Fourteen years after being wrongfully convicted of a murder Mister Myrden is pardoned and released from prison. Stepping back into the world, he feels overwhelmed and disoriented on the outside.

When he returns to his old neighbourhood, a street where violence lurks behind practically every door, he finds himself out of place and ambivalent to his wife, who is living in another man's house, to his friends, who want both to celebrate and to provoke further violence, and to the one million dollars compensation he has received from the government. Why Myrden wants is his daughter, now married to an abusive man, and his beloved granddaughter out of that neighbourhood.

Written in abrupt prose that brilliantly reflects Myrden's cautious evaluation of everyone and everything, 'Inside' pulls the reader forward with the quiet, creeping gravity of Greek tragedy. It is a dazzling novel about the institutions we create in order to keep people confined, and about a destructive family shutting off its children from life's vast possibilities.