Phoenix Distribution Drylands

<p><meta charset="UTF-8" />Winner, Miles Franklin Award, 1999<br /> Winner, QLD Premier's Literary Awards, Fiction, 2000<br /> <br /> This will be a book for the world’s last reader, she decided, chewing pen-end over an open exercise book.<br /> <br /> In the dying town of Drylands, Janet Deakin sells papers to lonely locals. At night, in her flat above the newsagency, she attempts to write a novel for a world in which no one reads—‘full of people, she envisaged, glaring at a screen that glared glassily back.’<br /> <br /> <i>Drylands</i>&nbsp;is the story of the townsfolk’s harsh, violent lives. Trenchant and brilliant, Thea Astley’s final novel is a dark portrait of outback Australia in decline.</p>