There are distant shouts, rifle shots, the pounding of feet across the bridge, the sound of running. A woman’s scream carves the night then bubbles away.

In 1930 the superintendent of a mission on a Queensland island, driven mad by his wife’s death, goes on a murderous rampage. Fearing for their lives, the other whites arm a young Indigenous man and order him to shoot Uncle Boss dead. The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow traces the lead-up to this bloody showdown and the repercussions in the years after—for Aboriginal people and the colonial overseers.

Thea Astley was born in Brisbane in 1925. Her first novel, Girl with a Monkey, was published in 1958 and her third, The Well Dressed Explorer (1962), won the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Many notable books followed, among them the groundbreaking A Kindness Cup (1974), which addressed frontier massacres of Indigenous Australians, and It’s Raining in Mango (1987). Her last novel was Drylands (1999), her fourth Miles Franklin winner. Her fiction is distinguished by vivid imagery and metaphor; a complex, ironic style; and a desire to highlight oppression and social injustice. One of the most distinctive and influential Australian novelists of the twentieth century, Astley died in 2004.

A lifelong chain-smoker famed for her sharp wit, Thea Astley died in 2004, the year after her husband died. She remains one of the most distinctive and influential Australian novelists of the twentieth century.

‘Passion, brilliance and originality.’ Sydney Morning Herald

‘Formidable…Uniquely provocative, acerbic and glittering.’ Australian