Girl With a Monkey

Written in Astley’s trademark spiky prose, laced with challenging vocabulary and scattered with French phrases and quotations from Horace, Catullus and the Catholic Mass, Girl with a Monkey tells the story of an assertive young woman called Elsie who is escaping from what we would call today a stalker.

In her short period of time in what is obviously Townsville though it’s never named, Elsie has been out with a number of young men, all of them disappointing and not just because they are not her intellectual match. Her escape is facilitated by requesting a transfer to a different school, and the novel traces her last day in the town.