The purpose of this project is to make a limited edition special collectors edition of the novel The Antipode Room, which will be published on December 1, 2013. The aim is to make a limited edition eBook, and signed print book to commemorate the launch. This will also be the first book publication of its kind in Australia, hence the occasion for a commemorative edition.
The book began life in an MA and PhD in creative writing and literature and has since evolved into its own form. This is the first author-publisher new literary publication, to use eBook and printed book format in Australia, which aims to show other authors that this is a viable way of reaching new audiences and readers.
Synopsis:
Interweaving loss of self-awareness coupled with a strange excursion or journey, The Antipode Room, is a fugue narrative, telling of Ruby’s flight to Australia and her past lost life, it voices the main characters’ inner thoughts of: Ruby, Hugo, Ray and Margarita. She ends up on a murder charge in an Australian jail.
Innocents are often condemned, scapegoated, for crimes they did not commit, but is this the case with Ruby? Imprisoned in Australian jail she writes to remember what happened on that "fateful fatal afternoon" when her best friend violinist, Margy, was murdered. The Antipode Room is based in London, Sydney, Newcastle, forest in northern New South Wales, the underground opal town Cooper Peedy and the desert. The main character "Countess Ruby Rivers" emerged in London from an amnesiac fugue, forgetting her past, she reinvents her self-identity and her past. Her life is transformed when she meets the infamous conservative phenomenologist and professor, Hugo, who gives her Ruby Love, a contemporary art gallery in inner London. The Antipode Room is a point of departure, the space of the art gallery, it tells the story of their one-way trip to Australia on a mission to collect Australian artists for Ruby Love.
A chance meeting in a Sydney art galley, at the opening of the NEW REPUBLIC exhibition brings Ruby into dangerously close proximity to the leader of art-activists, Art Criminals, who had a mysteriously profound influence in another life; she has not been able to forget his words, and her lost self rushes back. Forgetting Hugo, she disappears with Ray.
I think you might lose yourself gazing into mesmerizing sclerophyll
forests in northern New South Wales.
Another day I
might feel inclined at the low ebb before lunch, to go into my office and lock
the door. Browse through my private collection; fall into images of beauty, irresistibly
seductive objects of desire. Objects. I can hold within my gaze. I can own and
possess in a way that’s impossible to ever possess a real lover. Make mine forever.
(The Antipode Room)
The Antipode Room is 75,000 words, a medium length novel of approx. 240 pages to be published as an eBook, and printed book, with photographs.
The cover image is a new photographic work:
Blue Fugue, digital photographic montage, Ruth Skilbeck (2013)
E-Book and printed book.
