The award-winning sequel to the acclaimed memoir Hoi Polloi.
“The dynasty has started with my father as the founding father and me his only son, the founding son. He looks forward to the day when he can watch his grandchildren out there in the clover-covered paddocks frolicking among the cowpats. Playing with a pony, getting stung by bees. The most wholesome activities in the world.”
With their only son on the brink of adolescence, the nouveaux-riches Sherbornes move away from the city to start a new, gentrified existence on a 300-acre farm – or “estate” – in Taonga, New Zealand. But life on the farm is anything but wholesome. Sherborne evokes his family’s slide into madness through a series of unforgettable, hilarious portraits: of “Feet,” his once-glamorous mother, now addled with snobbery, paranoia, and mental illness; of “The Duke,” his uncomprehending, sporadically violent father; and of himself, the “Lord Muck” of the title, at once helpless victim and ruthless agent of their undoing, who in the end must decide whether he can save his family.
Clear-sighted, lyrical, and marvellously funny, Muck is a heart-rending memoir of family discord and an exquisite story of a young artist in search of a self.
Praise for Muck:
“Craig Sherborne’s daring, innovative prose is as exhilarating as his disciplined mastery of it is humbling. In service to an unnervingly sharp intelligence, it enlivens us to the comedy, the pathos, the dignity and the pain of life, as his characters live it. Muck is a masterpiece.” —Raimond Gaita
“Mordantly true to life … One of the most interesting autobiographical projects on the go” – J.M. Coetzee
“Excellent – it disturbs me to admit that Craig Sherborne goes deeper than the rest of us into the territory of impressionable immaturity. He writes beautifully, especially when the material is not beautiful at all. He can make the cruel truth poetic.” —Clive James
“A work of searing originality and part of an ongoing masterpiece” —Peter Craven, The Monthly
Winner of the Non-Fiction Book Award, 2008 Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards
Craig Sherborne
The Amateur Science Of Love
$32.95 – Trade paperback / Text Publishing
They say we fall in love. But really we fall in sickness. I lost appetite for food in those two nights with Tilda. My stomach was sunken in its wishbone cavity. Me, I was never sick, but I was sick now, the strangest sic... Buy or find out more →
Muck
$19.95 – Paperback book / Black Inc
The award-winning sequel to the acclaimed memoir Hoi Polloi.
“The dynasty has started with my father as the founding father and me his only son, the founding son. He looks forward to the day when he can watch his grandch... Buy or find out more →
Hoi Polloi
$19.95 – Paperback book / Black Inc
The hilariously compelling memoir that was hailed as an instant classic.
“The first time I see drunks beat up my father I’m six and standing at the bend in the stairs. I press my face against my mother’s waist but with o... Buy or find out more →
Muck
$27.95 – Trade paperback / Black Inc
Muck opens in NZ in late 1970s on a big dairy farm the narrator's parents have brought to be their estate and his legacy. They plan to build a big manor house, keep him away from the local gold-digger girls and live out ... Buy or find out more →
Hoi Polloi
$27.95 – Trade paperback / Black Inc
The hilariously compelling memoir that was hailed as an instant classic. 'The first time I see drunks beat up my father I'm six and standing at the bend in the stairs. I press my face against my mother's waist but with o... Buy or find out more →
Necessary Evil
$19.95 – Paperback book / Black Inc
"Originality may not be everything in poetry but it's hard enough to find at any moment in literary history. Necessary Evil is a consummate book, and of an instantly insistent originality. With it Sherborne goes to the t... Buy or find out more →