AustLit

'The shortlist for the 2010 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction included works by two world-famous writers, winners of an impressive array of local and international literary prizes. Yet neither Summertime, the third instalment of J.M. Coetzee’s fictionalised autobiography, nor Ransom, David Malouf’s radiant retelling of an episode from the Trojan War, won the award. The prize went to a lesser-known writer, Eva Hornung (formerly Eva Sallis) for a strange and strangely disturbing fable, Dog Boy, set in a decaying city haunted by feral creatures – both human and animal – which comes to be revealed in the course of the novel as present-day Moscow. Now, after a silence of some seven years, Hornung’s new novel reveals again her capacity to surprise, to follow a direction for which there is little precedent in her earlier work.' (Introduction)