The season for flying saucers by Brendan Colley

Having read the brilliant novel The signal line (2022) about a ghost train arriving in Hobart (there are no trains in Hobart), I was hardly surprised to discover that Colley’s second book is about a father abducted by aliens. The book cover image shows a figure being uplifted by a beam of light. Noah, the son, has grown up with regular ‘prepping’, sitting watching the sky in a state of readiness for the next thing. He writes poetry in obsessive preparedness to also visit another world – and the reader suspects it’s probably the reason his wife Sarah has just left him. He is alone living in the childhood home he has bought, ever a skywatcher, along with his neighbour Malcolm, and other curious people, waiting for the flying saucer lights to descend again.

In the Endnotes to the novel, Colley writes that there’s a ‘steep history of UFO sightings in Tasmania’; he references the sightings reported in documents of the Tasmanian Unidentified Flying Objects Investigation Centre across six decades. It was during one of those visitations that Noah’s father Warwick left his family. But with his departure from Earth, each of the family members seems to be touched with a special gift; for Noah it is an obsession with poetry writing, his mother Patricia sees the spirits of dead people and his sister Martha communicates with dogs.

Noah’s family has all split up; his wife has left him, and he is alone in an empty house with only his neighbour Malcolm interested in also sitting and watching the skies for alien visitors. It is a time of loneliness, but gradually the family reassembles, and with hope comes a feeling of home. It is a bizarre but touching story of humans slowly reconnecting and respecting each other.

If you are interested in reading something out of this world, with a gentle touch of humour, this book is for you.

Themes: Unidentified Flying Objects, Aliens, Home, Family, Loneliness, Hope, Philosophy.

Helen Eddy