Shortlisted for the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award

An Australian Book Review Book of the Year for 2020

The Sydney Morning Herald/The Age ‘Pick of the Week’ for 14-15 November 2020

In a snowbound village in the heart of the Alps, a husband and wife find their lives breaking apart in the days and months following the death of their firstborn. On the far side of the world, in their hometown of Sydney, a man on the margins of Australian society commits an act of shocking violence that galvanises international attention. As the husband recognises signs of his own grief in both the survivors and the perpetrator, his fixation on the details of the case feeds into insomnia, trauma, and an obsession with the terms on which we give value to human lives. A compulsive, compelling and lyrical novel, told with extraordinary empathy and emotional intelligence, this sweeping saga examines the nature of loss, the resilience and fragility of the family unit, and the stories we tell to explain the world.

Before dawn one day in midwinter, a man in flight from a crisis returns to a city he lived in long ago. He has lost everything—his home, his security, his sense of self—and now he sets off on foot through the streets as he prepares to knock on the door of an old friend, to swallow his pride and ask for a place to stay. But something unnameable interferes with his plans. He takes a turn around a corner. Then he turns again, and again, and again. He wanders off on tangents, re-crosses paths he has already followed, and moves in ever expanding circles, aimlessly pivoting around an invisible centre. He hesitates. He prevaricates. He can’t walk towards the shame of doing what he must. He stops, lingers, tarries. He touches the surfaces of the city, opens himself to its tones and textures. He delves into the past, his own past and the past of the place, bringing to mind his bygone encounters with life on the edge of solvency. His is a record of borderline squalor, of exploitation, of begging to maintain the status of even a precarious existence; a history of minor humiliations, of frustrated ambitions, of friendships with the marginalised and kinship with the dispossessed.

In his follow-up to the novella Unspeakable, Daniel Davis Wood embarks on a psychogeography of Edinburgh which takes form as a dance between movement and stasis, exhaustion and relief, otherness and selfhood. Part prose poem, part autofiction, In Ruins strings a series of minor narratives along the coiling, looping pathways of an itinerant mind, a lost soul. The result is a story that purposefully goes nowhere—a story that in fact revels in its refusal to conclude, using words to postpone an imminent return to a reality both alienating and utterly without pity.

In the midst of a brutal winter, a man commits an unspeakable crime. A decade after the fact, the fallout is pieced together by another man who was once a friend of the perpetrator. But as the free man tells the prisoner’s story, his words become marked by his efforts to do justice to all of the people whose lives have been touched by this singular event—and his search for a means of imaginative sympathy that might rescue the victim from her degradation.

Can sympathy alone rescue the victim from desecration and despair? Is moral imagination capacious enough to provide restitution? In hypnotic, lyrical prose, Daniel Davis Wood’s powerful novella probes the complex ethics of doing justice to the private tragedies of other people.

Winner of the 2014 Viva La Novella Prize

Blood and Bone is the tale of a man haunted by the violent truths of his ancestry. Through his attempt to document the remarkable child-hood of his great-aunt Abigail, we are thrown into life at the Whangie, an austere outpost at the colonial frontier. With the death of her mother, eleven-year-old Abigail must learn to fend for herself against the cruel stewardship of her father. At war with the local Aboriginals and intent on staking his claim on the land at any cost, what occurs between the two is a stunning powerplay that exposes the limits of the human imagination. Inhabiting the speculative peripheries of the historical record, Blood and Bone is an uncompromising exploration of Australia’s dark history and its legacy today.

Media Reviews

Blood and Bone fulfils two objectives: shedding light on a dark past, and exploring intellectual and aesthetic problems that the writing of such a story might create. … [T]he tale is made seamless by a tight structure and a hypnotic style that seems to owe something to the work of Gerald Murnane.

— Kerryn Goldsworthy, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age

This story, dealing with failures of connection and the denial of shared humanity, is related through a framing narration that draws deliberate attention to the ways in which the author’s imaginative ownership of the narrative may be contested. … The narration describes the process of historical research alongside the story that it generates, and in doing so, he repeatedly reminds the reader of the distance between himself and his subjects. While his research into the period affords some capacity to recreate imaginatively the facts of their experience, [the] narrator acknowledges that his attempts to capture the internal thoughts, emotions, and motivations of nineteenth-century characters like Scrymgeour and his daughter are dubious, and that he is unavoidably perceiving them through the lens of contemporary values, knowledge, and language. … [T]his is true of all historical fiction to some degree, but the uncomfortably self-aware narration denies the reader the expected verisimilitude, constantly reminding us that what we are reading is an achingly incomplete reconstruction of the past.

— Julian Novitz, Sydney Review of Books