Chemical Palace

If music was the soul of a party, concept and preparation the brain, performance the heart, sets the body, then the partygoers themselves were the lifeblood. A dance party was an organism, a planet, a living fiction. It was interactive theatre. Prime the partygoers with gifts, entreat them to indulge, give them a stage, bar no holes, and into the party they would flow as blood into a body, water into a river system.'
We follow a group of friends along their interwoven paths of creativity, hedonism, tragedy and love. In a city of humidity, harshness and beauty, of constant change, they struggle against adversity to create bacchanalian fantasies, celebrations and rituals whose ephemera echoes throughout their lives long after sunrise. McGregor brings us the heat, the sweat, the excess, the work behind the play, and the fallow periods of stillness and foment. Chemical Palace is a journey into the heart of Sydney's queer dance party culture.

Fiona McGregor showed us she was a remarkable writer with Au Pair and the award winning story collection, Suck My Toes. This novel fulfils the promise of her earlier work, and more, shows us that McGregor is one of the Australia's finest writers.
Suck my Toes
'Defies most straightjacket definition. . . McGregor is an exciting talent.' Tim Herbert, Outrage
' . . . An awesome sense of humour: filthy and wickedly witty.' Richard Nile, Sydney Morning Herald
Au Pair
'This is a work of alarming talent. It is a challenge to find enough good words to stretch across a description of this novel: clever, hilarious, wry, subtle, intense, sad and knowing. Karen Lamb, The Age