Ned Kelly’s reputation as an outlaw is growing. To the masses he’s a folk hero, but to the Establishment he’s the most wanted man in the British Empire - by Royal decree the only person that everyone is permitted to kill. When the authorities bring in an army of police to catch him, Ned plans a showdown at Glenrowan, an event that will cement his status as the revolutionary hero of the Australian underclass.

Robert Drewe’s strikingly imaginative re-creation of the inner life of Ned Kelly, the National Hero and Devil Incarnate of the Antipodes, is written with brilliant clarity and impressionistic economy. It carries the reader into a dream world of astonishing and violent revelation, an entrancing and frightening landscape of murder, sexuality, persecution, robbery, vanity, politics and corruption.