Literary fiction about meticulous people, the systems they trust, and the quiet ways certainty comes apart.
Australian Novelist · Literary Fiction & Literary Thrillers
Max Reval is a Sydney-based novelist. He grew up in France, surrounded by books and reading without borders — from Tonino Benacquista and Umberto Eco to Haruki Murakami — and that appetite for many worlds at once has never left him.
He writes restrained, precise literary fiction and thrillers, preoccupied with control, institutions, and the quiet ways certainty comes apart; among his contemporary touchstones are Kazuo Ishiguro and Mick Herron. Having lived in France, Italy and the United Kingdom, he now writes from Sydney, working across forms — essays, novellas, and novels both short and long. He is currently at work on his next novel, and lives in Sydney with his wife and son.
Thomas reads the histories of valuable things for a living — the chain of hands an object has passed through, and the points where that chain goes quiet. Then the small machinery of his own ordered life begins to slip: a door-chain left off, a distance that won't resolve, a receipt for a coffee he never bought. A precise, unsettling novel about authenticity, control, and who a careful man becomes when his certainties stop holding.
Seeking representationMatts Kanes — ex-SASR, and a man who has arranged his life to need no one — buys a 1971 Holden Monaro at a dead Russian émigré's estate auction. Three days later, men come to take it back. Concealed in its chassis are the keys to a Cold War sleeper network whose agents have since risen into the highest reaches of public life. A literary thriller about betrayal, vigilance, and a foreign operation built entirely on a misread.
Seeking representationAcross seventy-two hours in March 2029, four heads of state and the systems built to advise them produce a catastrophe none of them decided on. Told in compressed, alternating sections, the novel argues that disaster is not the moment a button is pressed, but the hours in which every competent person — doing their job to standard — fails to stop it.
Seeking representation