WINNER OF THE ARA HISTORICAL NOVEL PRIZE READERS' CHOICE AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE READINGS NEW AUSTRALIAN FICTION PRIZE

The price of genius is one hell of a hangover.

In 1892, New South Wales' most promising writer and least promising teetotaller, Henry Lawson, is banished to Bourke to 'find the real bush'. The goal: sober up, gather fresh material, and stop being such a disappointment. But what Australia's favourite literary son discovers in the river town is less a glorious national frontier than a collective nervous breakdown.

History records this as the trip that defined his career. Wayne Marshall records it as a surrealist action movie where Lawson must outrun his own myth and a gunslinger known as The Rider, aka Banjo - a poet significantly better at being a legend than Henry is.

Henry Goes Bush confronts the madness that lies behind our colonial dreaming - a moment where history is a hallucination and 'the bush' a phantasmagoric theme park. A reality in which The Bulletin's famed poetry wars are an actual shootout on the banks of the Darling River.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 ARA HISTORICAL NOVEL PRIZE

It turns out finding 'the real Australia' is easy; the hard part is surviving the encounter.

'like nothing you've read before' - MICHAEL WINKLER

'a genre-defying wonder of a novel' - RYAN O'NEILL

'surreal, singular, and deeply moving' - RHETT DAVIS