When Henry Lawson - New South Wales' most promising young writer and a budding alcoholic - is banished from Sydney to 'find the real bush', he expects only dust, despair and hangovers. Instead, he stumbles into a feverish collision of myth, politics and madness on the edge of the Darling River. Henry Goes Bush reimagines Lawson's fateful 1892 exile to Bourke as a surreal, time-bending journey through the birth of Australian identity - a work in which the lines between history, legend and hallucination blur. Combining biographical fiction with metafictional flair, the novel explores creativity, colonialism, and masculinity through the eyes of a man haunted by his own legend and undone by his search for truth in a landscape that refuses to be tamed. Think Peter Carey meets David Mitchell in the outback - a richly layered, darkly comic exploration of how the same stories make nations can ruin their tellers.