Reviews

The Good Captain

The Good Captain is a haunting novel, and, time and time again, prompts the questions that are at its centre. How far can we push nature before it fights back, or worse, crumbles completely beneath our onslaught? How far is too far in the name of preservation? - Westerly magazine

The rising popularity of cli-fi has led to a slew of books running the gamut between ‘horrifying predictions’ and ‘cautionary tales to inspire us’. Sean Rabin’s exploration of a climate crisis fuelled by catastrophic overfishing and sea-level change manages to pull the best parts of each approach, and asks: how will the average person react when anthropogenic climate change finally becomes too deadly to ignore?

A thrilling science fiction tale for our time, as we stand on a precipice that could very well lead to such a future. - AUREALIS #150 Review by Terence MacManus

Riveting and confrontational, Rabin has delivered an unforgettable story in The Good Captain which all to readily could be a small peek into what could be considered as a bleak environmental future, but also takes a tilt at extremist behaviour and the negligence of Government to accept that climate change is a very real event, occurring now. – Blue Wolf

Empty oceans, lost islands: Radicals fight to save the planet in tense thriller

The novel explodes with propulsive tension. Rabin executes virtuosic passages of motion and psychological dynamism with an easy deftness…

As he accomplished in his multiple-award-winning debut, Wood Green, where he depicted the misty eeriness of the Tasmanian bush, Rabin’s second novel casts a similar tenderness around our characters and its locations, while espousing a strong political message about climate change. - Sydney Morning Herald

Radical politics without compromising literary virtue…

“They were deluded with the belief that it was impossible to take too much.” … And it is this delusion Rabin wants us to wake from. - The Age

Wood Green

Sean Rabin's first novel, Wood Green, is at once a brilliantly sustained comic performance, an anatomy of a small community halfway up a brooding mountainside, an imagining of the processes of making fiction and their human costs…The novel's most extreme virtuoso turn is the strange, shocking, yet at the same time artfully prepared shift into a different kind of book from the one that we thought we'd been reading…among the best written about Tasmania. - Sydney Morning Herald

 "Let go of your expectations for a single narrative, this first novel by Sean Rabin is woven of many human lives…The book also provides a commentary on what it means to be a reader…It successfully interrogates the beast that is the novel, that is fiction, and it also plays most marvellously with the notion of what it means to be a writer…At its simplest level Wood Green is a ripper yarn with a magnificent twist." - The Mercury (Hobart)

"Stories about Faustian pacts are perennially fascinating…There's a special pleasure to be found in the way Rabin deals with literature and music…dark and evocative, a gorgeously rendered moody place where weird things happen…Wood Green is at once a love letter and a hate letter to literature, writing, writers and readers… in the end, its success comes down to the ultimate test of any novel: could I easily put it down? Reader, I could not." - The Saturday Paper

"Atmospheric, unsettling and claustrophobic…the unpredictable plot offered a twist that darted out from nowhere and took this story to another level…A compelling portrait of literary ambition and a tribute to the keen eye of small publishers like Giramondo." - June Book of the Month and #1 Bestseller in Better Read Than Dead bookshop, Sydney

"Wood Green deals with the complex business of forming and sustaining various kinds of relationships…with warmth, wit and intelligence…Merciless, unpredictable, and subversive…Wood Green is certainly a complex imaginative work, but it is also accessible…Wood Green's blurb prepares us for 'an unsuspected plot twist', but its denouement is more than just surprising: with it, Rabin deftly entwines the opposing literary values that his novel entertains, and conjures a climax of uncommon resonance and ambiguity." - Sydney Review of Books

 "I closed the book with a feeling of great satisfaction at having been hoodwinked, and then opened it again to browse through and admire the mastery with which it was done…Rabin has exposed ambition and arrogance in a splendid denouement, leaving the reader with much to think about. Highly recommended." - ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

 "It is the strangeness of Wood Green, however, that really elevates the book… By the close of play, Rabin reveals himself to be a writer of the Michel Faber type, able to fashion a narrative that is compelling, funny, humane and bizarre without ever losing his grip on the reader's hand. We'd recommend this book heartily and will be looking out for whatever Rabin turns his hand to next." - Bookmunch.wordpress.com

"While Wood Green could be considered experimental literature, it's not a wilfully difficult book. A Chinese box of a novel, an exploration of the friction between realism and the surreal, between style and function, and the other attendant questions that a writer must ask before putting pen to paper. The ending is quite bizarre." - The Australian