Lungfish

Lungfish

(Second Edition)

Stephen Gray

Alex Lungwicz is a young newly-qualified Melbourne lawyer unwilling to slot into the groove. He has left Melbourne and come to Darwin on Australia's northern frontier, to work as a 'lawman in a lawless town'. Like his half-developed namesake, the lungfish, trapped in an evolutionary glitch between water and earth, Alex feels unable to adapt to his new environment. Instead he discovers in the tropical hothouse fecundity of Darwin, that he is 'in the shark tank now'. In pellucid, elegant prose this novel chronicles the events and relationships that help him find direction.

'This may be the first true modern 'Darwin' novel. It is a beautifully detailed evocation of a unique place and social dynamic - that hasn't been so skillfully addressed since Herbert.'[Bill Perrett]

Stephen Gray is a writer and law lecturer based in Darwin. His novel 'The Artist is a Thief' (Allen and Unwin, 2001) won The Australian Vogel Literary Award in 2000. 'The Artist is a Thief' was also nominated for the Ned Kelly Awards for crime fiction, short-listed for the Vision Australia Library Awards, and was nominated for the 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He was named as one of the Sydney Morning Herald's best young novelists of the year in 2002, and was awarded a Developing Writers grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council to develop his third novel. This novel Lungfish won the Jessie Litchfield Award in 1998. He has also published a criminal law text-book Criminal Laws Northern Territory and numerous academic articles on indigenous legal issues, copyright and criminal law.