The Tyrant's Novel
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''The Tyrant's Novel'' is a 2003 novel by Australian novelist
Tom Keneally Thomas Michael Keneally, AO (born 7 October 1935) is an Australian novelist, playwright, essayist, and actor. He is best known for his non-fiction novel '' Schindler's Ark'', the story of Oskar Schindler's rescue of Jews during the Holocaust, ...
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Plot summary

An unnamed country's tyrannical ruler, Great Uncle, commands author Alan Sheriff to ghost-write a novel that will have the literary circles of the western world talking about him. The novel is told from the point-of-view of Sheriff after he has arrived in Australia as a refugee and been incarcerated in a detention centre.


Notes

* Dedication: To my brother, John Patrick, the good practitioner, with fraternal love


Reviews

Alfred Hicking in ''The Guardian'' was cautious about confirming the book as one of Keneally's best: " Keneally's novels are often prodigiously long and overstuffed with a multitude of literary devices - the bulging tome of 2002's ''Bettany's Book'' suggested there were at least two better-proportioned novels fighting to get out. By Keneally's standards, The Tyrant's Novel is a mere slip of a thing. Whether it will turn out to be the other book on his epitaph, we will have to wait and see." But Amanda Urban in ''Publishers' Weekly'' was a little more confident in her judgment. "In his hands, the cliché of the suffering artiste struggling to avoid selling out takes on real depth and pathos. This is an exquisitely wrought study of moral corruption in a convincing—and frighteningly modern—political dystopia."''Publishers' Weekly'', "The Tyrant's Novel, Thomas Keneally, author" by Amanda Urban
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Awards and nominations

* 2003 winner
Colin Roderick Award The Colin Roderick Award is presented annually by the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies at Queensland's James Cook University for "the best book published in Australia which deals with any aspect of Australian life". It was first presente ...


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Tyrant's Novel, The 2003 Australian novels Novels by Thomas Keneally