Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

This masterpiece is written like water - the rhythms of its words, moving and flowing back and forth in time, and characters that bleed into each other - ‘real life' and imagination, illusion, delusion are indistinct, and the distinction is irrelevant. This book is Neptune incarnate. It is brilliant, brutal, beautiful, bewildering, horrifying and fascinating.
Its brilliance is in its evocation of the true timbre of colonial Tasmania that treads the knife-edge between a fictionalised baroque fantasy and historical record.
Immediate Australian classic. Bit tough-going at times, but crazy piece of genius storytelling.