 | Peter Temple's new novel, Truth, is published by Text Publishing today, and, as you might expect given the reception the author's previous novel, The Broken Shore, received, you're going to see a lot about this book over the coming weeks. I've spoken to three people who have read this novel already (one's a book reviewer, one used to work at Text and one still does) and they have all been very impressed with it. Amazon in the UK has the book's publication there set for 7 January 2010 from Quercus, and Amazon in the US lists a date of 13 April 2010 from Random House (Canada). Jason Steger, of "The Age" travelled up to Ballarat to interview the author on the eve of the book's publication: |
Truth is not a sequel to The Broken Shore, more a companion piece. Temple was worried that readers might get the impression that it heralded another series. (Not that he's done with either Cashin or Irish. Both pop up in Truth; walk-on roles that show his affection for them. And there will be more Irish down the track.)Needless to say, we're all champing at the bit to get our hands on this books here at Matilda.
Temple has always been interested in power and its exercise - ''what I see as the disintegration of things, the way every step forward carries with it its own slide backwards, that all the things we try to do even with the best of intentions are doomed''. And the bleak political world he unmasks in the book? Simply the way he sees it. ''It is the perception of reality. What is the reality itself? People don't really know.''
He doesn't like to make things easy for the reader; indeed he likes to make things as complex as he can. That's largely for his own benefit - when he reads other writers of crime he finds them never as complicated as they should be. ''I hate having things spelled out to me.''
