Brian Castro is one of the most innovative and challenging novelists writing in English today. By virtue of his childhood migration from Hong Kong to Australia, he is an Australian writer, but he writes from the margins of what might be termed mainstream Australian Literature. For Castro, margins are places of extremities rather than limits, places where experimentation and risk flourish.
Castro's complex and elaborate semantics, constructed in order to challenge and unsettle the reader's expectations, have meant that he has a select readership. He is an intellectual, deeply ironic, modernist writer.
This monograph focuses on the operation of language in Castro's first eight novels. Through close readings of those novels Brennan opens up rhizomatic connections between Castro's work and the multitude of texts and theorists that influence it and with whom it converses.
Since publication Castro has published three further works of fiction.