The City of Quartz — Ian Irvine

Rowan Sweeney is a thirty-three year old perpetual student with relationship and vocational issues. Out of desperation he takes a job with Douglass Green - a Doctor of 'something or other', publisher of 'curios', and New Age therapist living in Central Victoria. Rowan soon discovers Green has a hidden agenda involving Neo-Druidism, Alchemy, cricket, music, obscure languages, and a quantum computer. Asked to write a biography about Abraham Isles, 'an important 19th Century convict-mystic', Rowan quickly realises he's in over his head ... literally.

The novel is partially set in an Alternative Australia where the European colonisation of the continent took a different path early in the 1830s. The novel explores themes related to: the place of creativity in life and society, the impact of colonisation on indigenous peoples, New Science notions of self-identity, creativity and physical reality, and the age old conflict between Materialism and sacred views of the cosmos. It is also a story about love and assuming adult responsibilities in our complex post-modern world.