Bye-Bye Dolly Gray / Antony O'Brien

From the outset, O'Brien spins a sticky web, which step-by-step enmeshes then hooks his reader into a wonderful array of protagonists, conflicts, horses and armaments set against the Australian and South African landscapes. O'Brien's precise language and powerful dialogue reconstructs the last days of the nineteenth century and the dawn of the twentieth century. His intimate knowledge of the Australian bush and South African veld become part of this adventure. Heroic and demonic men and women jump form the pages of this novel snatching the reader into their rip-snorting adventures of intrigue, murder, escape, evasion and survival.

Antony O'Brien is an historian with interests in the history of Victoria, the Boer War and much more. This is O'Brien's first novel.

Read in News Weekly here.