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