Extinctions

Winner of the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award

He hated the word retirement, but not as much as he hated the word village, as if ageing made you a peasant or a fool. Herein lives the village idiot.

Professor Frederick Lothian, retired engineer, world expert on concrete and connoisseur of modernist design, has quarantined himself from life by moving to a retirement village. His wife, Martha, is dead, and his two adult children are lost to him in their own w…