A new literary work
Andrew Upton
A chicken’s-eye view of a world on the brink of catastrophe, not unlike our current world – the debut novel – from author, playwright, and former Artistic Director of the Sydney Theatre Company, Andrew Upton.
About the book
Written for his unborn daughter on a smallholding in Nazi Germany just before the war, Krank Fuss (‘sick foot’) tells the story of one of a brood of chickens recently acquired by a WWI veteran from a neighbouring farm.
Ostracised because of her deformed limb, Krank Fuss befriends Gibby, a toad who considers themself a frog, and together they explore the world of the farm around them. Over the course of the tale, she learns the biggest dangers are never as bad as she imagined, and that even though she has no say in the conditions of her life, she must still make decisions and those decisions matter because terrible cruelty and violence are much closer than she had thought possible.
Part allegory in the spirit of Animal Farm, part Art Brut parable, Krank Fuss unfolds against the background of an impending social catastrophe, unsettlingly echoing the world today. It is the story of the innocent discovering the cruelty of the natural world, seeking for another way that might allow the delicate Wonder of Life to peak above the nastiness, brutishness and brevity of her apparent Fate.
"A deft political satire brimming with empathy and wit"
CHRIS FLYNN, author of Orpheus Nine and Mammoth
About The Author
ANDREW UPTON was born in Sydney in 1966, the youngest of three children to John, a former navigator in Mosquitoes with the RAF during WWII and later a G.P., and Patty, an Australian-born Nurse, from a big Catholic family.