INFINITE SPLENDOURS

With the impact of seminal novels like Hanya Yanigahara's A Little Life, Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones and Andrew O'Hagan's Be Near Me, Infinite Splendours is a stunning achievement from one of our most original, acclaimed and bestselling writers.

Lawrence is a bright, kind and talented boy of ten years old when he is groomed and raped by his damaged uncle. The act severs Lawrence from himself. Like the stammer Lawrence develops, where words collide and are blocked, so is he. When Lawrence reaches early adulthood, he starts a friendship with the son of one of his workmates. He connects with the boy he once was, damaged beyond repair. At the heart of Lawrence's desires is the longing to be made whole. But after he is savagely beaten by the boy's father and his workmates, Lawrence decides to retreat from the world. He stays on in his mother's country home, and lives as a hermit for the next thirty years. When a single mother moves into the abandoned farm next door to Lawrence with her teenage daughter and ten-year-old son, his isolation is shattered and he withdraws completely. But the mother asks him to get back to work on the vegetable garden he'd been tending on their land before their arrival. Her boy David is left alone at home a lot, and he and Lawrence begin a friendship. The sense of tension and foreboding is almost unbearable as we witness the boy's growing interest in Lawrence and the older man's blossoming at the chance of the tenderness he has been denied his whole life. In the end, an act of breathtaking courage and sacrifice will save both Lawrence and the boy, but by then your heart will have shattered into a million pieces. Miles Franklin-award winner Sofie Laguna's new novel is both dark and confronting, but transformative through the light, redemption and joy the author so masterfully conjures in its pages. You finish the book with a sense of wonder and exhilaration for what she has achieved and what the book has given you as a reader. SOFIE LAGUNA's third novel The Choke won the 2018 Indie Book Award for Fiction and her second novel for adults, The Eye of the Sheep was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and won the 2015 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Her first novel for adults, One Foot Wrong, was published throughout Europe, the US and the UK. Sofie's many books for young people have been published in the US, the UK and in translation throughout Europe and Asia. The list of awards her novels have been listed for is a lengthy one, including the Prime Minister's Literary Award, the Stella Prize, the International Dublin IMPAC Awards, the Voss Literary Prize, and the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal.