AustLit

'It’s 2022 and Helen is starting again. Newly single, adrift in a hostile rental market, she finds a four-bedroom house flanked by apartment blocks that stare into the yard. Despite the lack of privacy, she fills its rooms with an unlikely group of residents looking for communal belonging: a zine maker working on a punk music archive; an activist writing about Australian anti-communism; a research scientist striving to put down roots; and a part-time rugby league player who has one chance to play for his country before retirement. Each is looking to build a future, each is haunted by their recent past.' (Publication summary)

'For all the talk about western Sydney, has anyone decided where it begins and ends? Most would agree that it’s some way west of the harbour bridge, somewhat east of the blue mountains, and that wherever its boundary, there would be no ocean view. Before a time when ‘area of concern’ or ‘LGA of interest’ entered the parlance, you might have thought of the boundaries of western Sydney as somewhere between undrawn and imagined depending on your frame of reference. Before July 2021, maybe the closest anyone came to convincingly forming a consensus was the half-joke of the ‘Red Rooster Line,’ but it has become clearer now, hasn’t it?' (Introduction)

'Helen, Walt and Duncan are looking for ways to entertain themselves in the sprawl of Sydney’s western suburbs. Walt, scrappy and idealistic, wants to prove a point, and turns to petty vandalism. His friend Duncan sticks to his fledgling football career, and sexual encounters in strange houses. Walt’s sister Helen, restless and seeking something larger than herself, is forced by scandal to leave the family home. As they move into adulthood they gravitate to the dingy glamour of the inner-city suburbs, to escape their families’ complicated histories, and in search of new identities, artistic, sexual and political.

'The Magpie Wing is set on football fields, in punk gigs, and in dilapidated and gentrifying pubs, moving from the nineties to the present, and between the suburbs and the inner city. Max Easton’s debut novel explores how, even in a city divided against itself, disparate communities – underground music scenes, rugby league clubs, communist splinter groups – share unexpected roots.'

Source : publisher's blurb