AustLit

'Barrie Kosky’s peripatetic career has led him to work throughout Australia and Europe, before finally establishing a true connection with Berlin. Still, for the Melbourne-born theatre and opera director, nothing says “home” like a rehearsal room. “It just happened that theatre discovered me, and performance and music discovered me, because the very same time that I started to think, ‘Who am I? How does this relate to me?’ and felt that disconnectedness, was the very same time I was experiencing music: Mahler symphonies or puppet shows or musicals or opera. And it was very linked.'  (Introduction)

'You’ve gotta love a novel about hardship and destruction that’s also a nicely crafted happiness machine – particularly when the hardship comes in the form of zombies, creatures whose prime motive is the consumption of the public, and whose ideas of happiness differ from yours and mine.' (Introduction)

'You enter the hedge maze planted with lilly pilly shrubs. Dead end follows dead end as each twist and turn yields more of the same. You begin to get weary. And then there’s something remarkable. Right at the end of the labyrinth, waiting like an oracle or a punchline that baffles comprehension, you discover a live zebra calmly grazing, absolutely content and unexpected.'  (Introduction)