The Unknown Industrial Prisoner
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
Winner of the Miles Franklin Award in 1971, The Unknown Industrial Prisoner stands as one of the most ferocious and darkly comedic novels in the Australian literary canon, set within the suffocating confines of an oil refinery on the outskirts of Sydney. David Ireland chronicles the dehumanising grind of the refinery workers — known only by sardonic nicknames like the Potteries and the Glass Canoe — as they endure the soul-crushing monotony of industrial labour under the indifferent eye of faceless corporate management. The novel presents no conventional plot; instead, it constructs a panoramic mosaic of working-class life, where black humour, rebellion, and quiet desperation are the only currencies that matter. Ireland's prose is savage and unrelenting, wielding grotesque satire as a scalpel to dissect capitalism, alienation, and the erasure of individual identity within modern industrialised society. His fragmented, episodic structure mirrors the disorienting repetition of factory life itself, making the form inseparable from the novel's argument. A towering achievement of Australian literature, The Unknown Industrial Prisoner remains as urgent and unsettling today as when it was first published — a novel that demands the reader confront the true cost of the machine age on the human spirit.
Author: David Ireland
Format: Paperback
Genre: Modern fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
Winner of the Miles Franklin Award in 1971, The Unknown Industrial Prisoner stands as one of the most ferocious and darkly comedic novels in the Australian literary canon, set within the suffocating confines of an oil refinery on the outskirts of Sydney. David Ireland chronicles the dehumanising grind of the refinery workers — known only by sardonic nicknames like the Potteries and the Glass Canoe — as they endure the soul-crushing monotony of industrial labour under the indifferent eye of faceless corporate management. The novel presents no conventional plot; instead, it constructs a panoramic mosaic of working-class life, where black humour, rebellion, and quiet desperation are the only currencies that matter. Ireland's prose is savage and unrelenting, wielding grotesque satire as a scalpel to dissect capitalism, alienation, and the erasure of individual identity within modern industrialised society. His fragmented, episodic structure mirrors the disorienting repetition of factory life itself, making the form inseparable from the novel's argument. A towering achievement of Australian literature, The Unknown Industrial Prisoner remains as urgent and unsettling today as when it was first published — a novel that demands the reader confront the true cost of the machine age on the human spirit.