AustLit

'The city was in the same place. But was it the same city?

'Alice stands outside her family's 1950s red brick veneer, unsure if she should approach. It has been sixteen years, but it's clear she is out of options.

'Lydia opens the door to a familiar stranger - thirty-nine, tall, bony, pale. She knows her sister immediately. But something isn't right. Meanwhile her son, George, is upstairs, still refusing to speak, and lost in a virtual world of his own design.

'Nothing is as it was, and while the sisters' resentments flare, it seems that the city too is agitated. People wake up to streets that have rearranged themselves, in houses that have moved to different parts of town. Tensions rise and the authorities have no answers. The internet becomes alight with conspiracy theories.

'As the world lurches around them, Alice's secret will be revealed, and the ground at their feet will no longer be so firm.' (Publication summary) 

'The novel has been consistently threatened by competition from new mediums. From modernism to postmodernism and beyond, many writers have responded to this competition by innovating and incorporating new styles, forms and techniques for the novel. In the digital age, despite the threat to print from online sources, linear print novels remain the dominant fictional mode – even though most of us communicate and consume through a discontinuous array of digital media that bears little resemblance to them. Adam Hammond has declared ours a ‘hybrid moment … [in which we have] one foot in the print world and the other in the digital’ (2016). Recently authors have published augmented books – print novels enhanced with additional digital components – which belong to a wider category of intermedial narratives (Ryan 2016). This paper analyses the hybrid print-digital forms of Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad; positions the combination of print and digital narrative as a modern innovation in response to media competition; and argues that such approaches remediate the novel in ways that allow authors to reflect our hyper-attentive digital with fidelity.'  (Publication abstract)