A savage modern fable about science, family, television, and love gone wrong

Eric Yoshiaki Dando

ISBN: 9780980517903
Trade paperback, 288pp
RRP: $29.95
Pub Date: October 2008

'Imagine Woody Allen and Chuck Palahniuk programming a festival for your brain …
Part satirical horror, part spooky speculative fiction, a savagely funny critique
of consumer-driven society.' — The Big Issue

'Vonnegut meets Orwell in Oink, Oink, Oink…a droll and unsettling nightmare of a book.'—The Age

'This black little fable begins with one of the best opening sentences I've seen lately, something that could sum up an entire generation's understanding of 20th-century world history.'—Sydney Morning Herald

'Oink is futuristic, zany, black, surreal.'—The Sunday Age

'It rattles like a busy Doctor’s bag of pills.This book is a comic strip, it’s a movie, it’s a cultural moment, it’s a soapy,
it’s a scientific treatise, it’s a horror story, it's an epic, it’s a cultural ambassador for Japan, America, and Australia, it’s a biography, it’s a picture book, it’s a drug novel, a consumerist's nightmare, a dream, an allegory, and it’s a Surrealist novel in much the same way as the underlining horror of Pop-art was to America in the 1960s'—πO, Australian Poet.



A young boy grows up in rural Japan, raised by his mother among the clamour of industrial machines at the local fish cannery. He has never met his father, an Australian genetic scientist —he pieces together his sense of identity from fragments of the family history. His only vision of the west is gleaned from his mother’s favourite Elvis Presley movies.

One day in the late 1980s he receives a plane ticket, along with a letter from his father telling him it is time for him to come and live in Australia.When he gets there he learns that his father is a rich and famous scientist and entrepreneur, well known for his bizarre inventions. He is quickly dragged into the crazy world of his father’s top-secret genetic research and experiments into cloning.

What follows is a surreal, black comedy—a seductively hip, hilariously funny satire of popular culture and consumerism. Oink, Oink, Oink is a savage modern fable about science, family, television, and love gone wrong.


Eric Yoshiaki Dando is the author of the cult novel Snail (Penguin, 1996). His short fiction has been published in The Age, Overland, and Australian Goat World. He lives in Melbourne.

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