Preincarnate

Book excerpt: Australia’s pre-eminent comic Renaissance man turns his genius to novel writing. Having conquered television, radio, theatre and film, Shaun Micallef smashes his mighty fist onto the keyboard of his soul and produces a novel of such breathtaking brilliance that if Patrick White were alive today he’d hurl his own typewriter into the sea and start a lawn-mowing business. Suppose you were murdered and woke up 300 years earlier in someone else’s body. Wouldn’t you put yourself in suspended animation and be re-awoken in time to prevent yourself being murdered in the first place? This is the extraordinary tale of an ordinary man in a race against and across time. Join Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, HG Wells, Queen Victoria, Jack the Ripper and Tom Cruise as they unravel a Masonic plot to restore James II to the throne – and in the process, perhaps destroy the Universe itself. Soul transference, time travel, cloning, space ships, Hollywood and the Loch Ness Monster all come together for the first time in one action-packed and beautifully typeset novel. Preincarnate, Micallef’s first – and very probably only – novel, shows not only that he is the rightful heir to the mantle of White but also the unruly bastard son of Barry Humphries, Clive James and Miles Franklin (obviously they’d all been very drunk that night).