Beginning in the year 300 BC and ending with a theatre company in a small Western Australian town as they prepare for a show, The Fountain of Youth is another riotous and rollicking novel from John Kinsella, and the third volume of his ongoing ‘Lucida’ cycle. In the small wheat-belt towns of Western Australia, the locals are either benign or malicious, indifferent or intrusive. Among their ranks are vegan activists, paramilitary sects, doomsday preppers, thespians, playwrights, and of course, the odd extraterrestrial. These unlikely neighbors intersect at the straining joints of religion, faith, secularism, technology, and the pressure is beginning to build. The Fountain of Youth is a rare and remarkable book in which guerrilla environmentalists, hidden identities, mythological origins, and theoretical physics unfold in gorgeous, surreal waves of language.
