In Patrick Allington’s Rise & Shine, an environmental apocalypse has wiped out most of the population. Those that survive are nourished – literally – by the consumption of violent footage from the perpetual war waged between the two city-states of Rise and Shine. In Dennis Glover’s Factory 19, a Walshian figure leads a willing cohort back to the future to an enclave in Tasmania, where they search for happiness in an industrialised past. Both books offer surreal and darkly satirical takes on leadership, humanity and the common good.

Chaired by Geordie Williamson