AustLit

'Zed Burton loves sport, alcohol, fast food and girls … he’s a fairly normal 15-year-old of the future. But normality has its risks. When Earth is taken over by ultra-conservative forces, it isn’t long before the Morality Police come knocking on his door. Before he wakes up to the danger facing him, his life takes a downward spiral that will see his mother condemned to poverty and disgrace and himself exiled to one of Jupiter’s moons, Callisto … exiled for life. There, he encounters a bizarre human colony where every adult is a shrink and where head transplants are more popular than facelifts. The Moon Governor has special plans for him but she won’t say what. Will he be able to keep his body intact? Will he ever make it back to Earth to see his mother and to set things right? A thoroughly surprising story about sanity, suffering and sin in the youth of tomorrow. Could we really end up like this?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Global Warming - governments everywhere have put it in the "too-hard basket." But not in Australia where the Prime Minister is loudly trumpeting his concern on the international stage. Behind closed doors, however, it's a very different story and one the P.M. wants to keep tightly under wraps. Then along come the Randters: two illiterate geriatric farmers tricked off their land at Wombat Hole in the desolate outback. Now struggling to survive homeless in the city, they meet an idealistic young Goth who helps them hide their deficiencies and get clerical employment in NOCCAM, the Australian government's elite climate change quango. Here they witness a seedy struggle between pure science and human greed. On one hand, CEO, ex-insurance manager, Jolyon Butters, doesn't want to rock the boat and has outlandish plans for self-aggrandizement. On the other hand, Australia's leading authority on climate science, the cold and clinical Dr Harry Kernot, is channeling information from a long dead scientist and monitoring disturbing climate news from Hell. The stakes are high. Will Australia's massive coal and cattle industries be forced to close down? Or will someone die to keep them open for 'business as usual'? In the wake of his bizarre and imaginative novel "Do Kangaroos Believe in God?", Andrew Thelander has taken an award-winning short story and expanded it into a masterfully dark comic novel that strips bare the forces at work around Global Warming action. A literary gem that future generations will read with delight - or disbelief.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Feathers fly when a penniless wildlife artist accidentally traps the world's last living Paradise Parrot in the ramshackle ghost town he shares with his enigmatic pet wallaby and a mysterious Indian barrister. It seems everyone has a claim on the soon-famous bird, and the reclusive and unworldly young painter finds himself up against government bureaucrats, animal protection officials, police, the courts, the gutter press, and an eccentric multi-millionaire birdwatcher with madcap plans of his own. Nothing else for it but to take flight into the great Australian bush where the artist, his brilliant and beautiful, newly discovered zoologist sister, a pompous university professor and an obsessed taxidermist lose their inhibitions, their clothes - and in some cases their minds - living with, and learning to think as, wild kangaroos. In his and her own way, every key character in Andrew Thelander's hilarious, sometimes touching, often profoundly wise, tale is a Last Bird ... an utterly unique, wildly exotic example of an endangered species' (publisher website).