Waypoints
by Adam Ouston
“Artful, terrific, heaps of fun. Adam Ouston is hugely talented.”
Robbie Arnott, author of Limberlost
Paperback: £9.99
ePub: £3.99
An Australian Book Review "Book of the Year" for 2022
Shortlisted for the 2022 Tasmanian Premier's Literary Award
Shortlisted for the 2023 ALS Gold Medal
Longlisted for the 2023 Miles Franklin Literary Award
In 1910, the famed escapologist Harry Houdini made an ill-fated attempt to become the first person to fly an aircraft over Australian soil — yet while Houdini is remembered today for his failure, the true record-holder has been forgotten. Now this quirk of history becomes fodder for the obsessions of one Bernard Cripp, the world-weary scion of an ailing family circus, as he tries to unearth every detail of Houdini’s flight in order to re-enact it, right down to the crash-landing. But why is Bernard so single-minded? As his manic testimony unspools, his story takes on a darker tone: he is, in fact, in mourning for a wife and child he has lost to the skies, and paralysed by an uncertainty surrounding their deaths. If his efforts to re-create history cannot bring back his loved ones, can they at least bring him peace as he struggles to live with his loss?
In Waypoints, his outlandish début novel, Adam Ouston embarks on a journey to reclaim a lost sense of awe and wonder from subjects as diverse as Victorian vaudeville and cutting-edge data storage, from the early history of Alzheimer’s disease to the immortality of human consciousness. Blending the solemnity of Sebald with the breathlessness of Bernhard, the result is equal parts rambunctious and ruminative, poignant and hilarious — a wild ride through a storm of grief, ambition, integrity, remembrance, and love.
About the Author
Adam Ouston is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, and the recipient of the 2014 Erica Bell Literary Award as well as the manuscript prize at the Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Awards in 2017. He holds a PhD and has worked as a copywriter, editor and bookseller. As a musician he performs as Costume. He lives in Hobart, Tasmania.
Bonus Content
Read excerpts from Waypoints:
Listen to Adam Ouston interviewed on the Beyond the Zero podcast.
Praise for Adam Ouston
Artful, terrific, heaps of fun. Adam Ouston is hugely talented.
I adored Waypoints. It’s a hypnotic and intricately layered story, told with masterful control. Also, it’s very funny.
Robbie Arnott
author of The Rain Heron
Best Books of 2022, The Age/Sydney Morning Herald
Ouston’s ambitious, Lissajous-curved Waypoints chases its protagonist’s varied obsessions down fabulous rabbit-holes.
Michael Winkler
author of Grimmish
Best Books of 2022, The Age/Sydney Morning Herald
Waypoints is a literary spectacle of aerial acrobatics.
Bram Presser
author of The Book of Dirt
Best Books of 2022, The Age/Sydney Morning Herald
Fever dream meets doomscroll: Ouston’s wild début unpicks the unfathomable, from the trickery of capitalism and the dystopia of our information-overloaded age to the opacity of grief, with captivating storytelling and a perfect dose of humour to balance out the gloom.
Justine Hyde
Best Books of 2022, The Saturday Paper
Waypoints is an appealing short novel written in long, fluid, circumlocutory sentences that betray the influence of a certain strand of European modernism, but which have a distinctly Australian inflection. Organised around the story of the narrator’s attempt to recreate Harry Houdini’s failed attempt in 1910 to become the first person to achieve a piloted flight in Australia, the novel’s philosophical musings on all manner of topics present a winning combination of dark humour and formal ambition.
James Ley
Best Books of 2022, Australian Book Review
Ouston’s wildly digressive novel interrogates our obsession with data and the impossibility of finding ‘a rock on a beach made of rocks’. It’s fascinating and funny and tragic and packed full of ideas.
Jane Rawson
author of From the Wreck
What a performance, what a vaudevillian extravaganza, what a high-flying swoop up into the empyrean — the realm of pure fire, according to the ancients, the highest part of heaven. A triumph. I loved it, right to the last word. … I am quite awestruck and gobsmacked by this endless goldmine of curiosities and bagatelles that come together (in a novel about falling apart infinitely) — come together miraculously, although there are no miracles, come together mysteriously although everything can be explained in the end, to tell me things I don’t want to know about being mortal right now.
Robert Dessaix
author of Corfu
A hypnotic novel, unlike any I’ve read. Original, lyrical, and brilliant.
Brendan Colley
author of The Signal Line
Waypoints is a novel of dragnet sentences that loop and repeat in a series of playful, Shandean digressions. The novel does not unfold so much as it crawls — the way a bot can run through two hundred password combinations a second: by failing again and failing better. … And behind every failure that exists in the everyday realm of contingency, there are higher-order failures that the novel is attempting to name: there is the failure of Language and Rationality to contain the multi-dimensionality of grief and there is the psychological frisson we experience from our own wilful acts of self-sabotage, or the failures of Failure itself.
Kasumi Borczyk
Sydney Review of Books
Ouston has built a plane out of Australian historical fiction, filled the tank with a few gallons of Thomas Bernhard and W.G. Sebald, spun the propeller, and taken off.
J.J. Errington
Australian Book Review
This is a brilliant work that allows the reader to effortlessly share and understand the emotions and preoccupations of its hero. It is a masterpiece of storytelling with a captivating and delicate touch. It conveys a deep sense of loss without imposing misery. It deals with serious matters like obsession and the overload of information, but doesn’t lose its sense of humour. It is erudite without a trace of snobbishness. It is a great novel.
Erich Mayer
ArtsHub
Waypoints starts with esoterically specific facts and expands outwards, like a tree and its branches, to paint a picture of grief; grief as experienced by the truly modern, secular individual. … How many books (or art in general) truly attempt to grapple with our Godless digital era? Or our sci-fi future, which is swiftly doing away with “fiction”? And how many attempt to confront death and grief with religion loosening its hold on the West? I’d venture to say that with these being the primary themes of our times, not nearly enough, at least not well; but Waypoints is refreshing for attempting to stare all of this down.
Matthew Taylor Blais
The Collidescope
An exciting, adventurous début novel. A meditation on time, mortality, technology, the future and the great unknown… it combines the picaresque quality of Peter Carey’s Illywhacker with the inquisitiveness of Aldous Huxley and the rhythms of a twinkly, whimsical Thomas Bernhard. Yet Ouston has his own style, taking circumspect precision, combining it with due fondness for the em dash, and then, like Lil Nas X with a bad case of logorrhea, riding until he can’t no more.
Declan Fry
ABC Arts
Waypoints is an intriguing work of fiction that will appeal to readers who are comfortable with having a delayed understanding of what’s going on in the text. If you’re ok with reading what seems to be randomness (but isn’t) you will enjoy Waypoints, even if — like me — you have to read and re-read and re-read again and again to join the dots, and then discover that the author has been playing games and sucked you into tracking something that was established as trivial at the outset.
Lisa Hill
ANZ LitLovers
Waypoints is a splendid example of one of my favourite genres of book — an obsessive monologue by an unreliable narrator, in this case somewhat pinned to reality through the disappearance of airliner MH370 in 2014 and Harry Houdini’s attempts to be the first person to fly an airplane over Australia in 1910.James Morrison
Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau
One glorious paragraph of obsession, planes, Houdini and heartache. Waypoints brings to mind the best bits of Joseph Heller while simultaneously being like nothing else you’ve ever read.
Emmy Reid
Fullers Books, Hobart