Maybe it doesn’t really matter where I stand … I mean, I’m supposed to stand with Adam. Wherever he stands. I’m nobody. That’s the whole point.

In Strange Fires, Ned Byrne is ghost-writing the autobiography of Adam Barlow, a celebrated AFL player, when the arrangement comes to an abrupt end. Unemployed and increasingly unmoored, Ned steals the fluid that’s been drained from Adam’s injured knee and injects himself with it. Soon, he begins to experience bizarre apparitions — but are they visions of a higher truth or are they dangerous signs of delusion or illness

Written from a cheap motel on the Gold Coast, this is Ned’s ‘Thief’s Journal’, the story of an intimate, unstable relationship between two men, and of the secret inheritance that burns at the heart of Adam’s life: a metaphysical power transmitted via blood and prayer.

Darkly comic and effortlessly compelling, Allinson's third novel draws the reader into a world teetering on the brink of miraculous destruction.