Fauna
How far would you go to save your daughter?
Set seventeen years into a very recognisable future, Fauna is an astonishing psychological drama with an incredible twist: What if the child you are carrying is not entirely human?
Using DNA technology, scientists have started to reverse the extinction of creatures like the mammoth and the Tasmanian Tiger. The benefits of this radical approach could be far-reaching. But how far will they go?
Longing for another child, Stacey is recruited by LifeBLOOD®, a company that offers massive incentives for her to join an experimental genetics program. As part of the agreement, Stacey and her husband’s embryo will be blended with edited cells. Just how edited, Stacey doesn’t really know. Nor does she have any idea how much her longed-for new daughter will change her life and that of her family. Or how hard she will have to fight to protect her.
Fauna is a transformative, lyrical and moving novel about love and motherhood, home and family-and what it means to be human.
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK
‘Fauna lays bare an electrifying genetically re-coded future so real, so terrifying, so close, I can feel its baby breath soft against my cheek.‘ – Robyn Mundy, author of Wild Light
The Albanian
Winner 2005 T A G Hungerford Award for Fiction.
Rosa, a young woman, from small- country-town Australia, longing for mystery, adventure and the exotic, is fatally attracted to a romantic image of Eastern Europe, arriving alone in Dubrovnik in the months before the implosion of the old Yugoslavia.
Rosa has no idea of the politics, yet she ends up dangerously drawn into a relationship with a young Albanian on his path to becoming a political refugee. Unable to tease apart destiny, reality and fantasy, she becomes a captive of her heart and the excitement and danger of the unknown.
Rosa does survive her ordeal – at times exhilarating, at times terrifying – finding within herself an unexpected strength and maturity, and ultimately finding love and belonging in the one place she had never looked.In this dreamy and delicate tale about longing and belonging, exile, love and war.
Donna Mazza brings us an updated variation on the theme of the innocent abroad – the Romantic idealist searching for a Romantic hero.
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK
‘Mazza’s story is compelling. It’s the type of book that doesn’t let you put it down even though you don’t want it to end. Welcome to our world, Donna, we’ve been waiting.’ STM
Donna Mazza is a West Australian author and academic at Edith Cowan University. She is author of Fauna (Allen & Unwin, 2020) and The Albanian (Fremantle Press, 2007), which received the City of Fremantle Hungerford Award. Her stories have recently been published in KYD New Australian Fiction _and _Westerly. She has written for the Conversation, Science-Write-Now and Antipodes on kangaroos, swearing, utopia and Australian literature. She was recipient of the Patricia Hackett Prize, Mick Dark Flagship Fellowship for Environmental Writing at Varuna Writers Centre, and Tyrone Guthrie International Exchange to Ireland.