Saint Antony in his Desert

Anthony Uhlmann

A defrocked priest, Antony Elm, has made his way into a desert outside Alice Springs, where he intends to stay for forty days and forty nights. He is undergoing a crisis of faith and has brought with him the typescript for a book he has failed to finish about a meeting between Albert Einstein and the French philosopher Henri Bergson. This story concerns a crisis of understanding, as Bergson confronts Einstein about the meaning of time.

On the back of his typescript Antony writes another story, somehow close to his heart, which concerns two young men traveling to Sydney from Canberra for the first time in the early 1980s. This story, about a crisis of love, takes place in a single night as the boys encounter temptation, damnation and salvation in the world of alternative music

Antony becomes increasingly delirious, observing temptations of the flesh and spirit, scribbling in the margins of his two unspooling narratives, awaiting a rescue that may or may not come.

Praise for St Antony In His Desert:

An ambitious novel of ideas set against a phantasmagoric Sydney.

J. M. COETZEE

 

This brilliant book, awash with literary skill and philosophical intelligence, will awaken the curiosity of anyone keen to ponder the meaning of time and how it is inexorably moored to our existence.

SUZIE GIBSON, AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

 

Book details

PUBLICATION DATE: June 2018.
FORMAT: Paperback
EXTENT: 184 pages
SIZE: 228 (H) x 159 (W) mm
ISBN: 9781742589787
RIGHTS: World rights.
CATEGORY: Anthony Uhlmann, Fiction,