By John Kinsella
Paperback: 9781628976519
eBook: 9781628976526
Publication Date: July 7th, 2026
Description
Strange things are happening in a small Australian town as the local theatre troupe prepares for their next performance. The Fountain of Youth is another riotous and rollicking novel from John Kinsella, and the third volume of his ongoing ‘Lucida’ cycle.
In the small wheat-belt towns of Western Australia, the locals are either benign or malicious, prophets or schemers, indifferent or intrusive. Among their ranks are vegan activists, paramilitary sects, doomsday preppers, thespians, playwrights, and of course, the odd extraterrestrial. These unlikely neighbors intersect at the straining joints of religion, faith, secularism, technology, and the pressure is starting to build.
The Fountain of Youth is a rare and remarkable book in which guerrilla environmentalists, hidden identities, mythological origins, and theoretical physics unfold in gorgeous, surreal waves of language.
Praise
“John Kinsella is an orphic fountain, a prodigy of the imagination.” —Harold Bloom
“A writer who turns to the natural world with a fierce light.” —Edward Hirsch, Washington Post
Biographical Note
John Kinsella is the author of many prize-winning volumes of poetry, including Peripheral Light: Selected Poems, Jam Tree Gully, and Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems. He has written numerous works of fiction and criticism, and taught poetry and literature in the USA, UK, and Australia. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University. Dalkey Archive Press published his novel Lucida Intervalla in 2019.