A Rising of the Lights by Steve Toltz

Posted by Ms A on May 13, 2026 in All | Leave a comment

A Rising of the Lights by Steve Toltz is not a book that sells itself easily. A novel about fraudsters, failure, hypnotism, artificial intelligence, sleep talking and emotional collapse sounds less like fiction and more like the daily observations of my friend Paddy in the dog park.

It’s hard to imagine the pitch meeting going smoothly. Still, Penguin Books took the gamble on Australian author Toltz’s follow-up to A Fraction of the Whole, and the result is gloriously unhinged.

The story follows Rusty, a man drifting through middle age with a job slowly being swallowed by AI and a wife calling time on their hollow marriage after falling in love with her Uber driver. We learn early on that Rusty’s parents separated him from his twin sister Bonnie over a game of dice when he was eight, and that he once worked as a child psychologist before losing his job after taking a troubled teenager to a cemetery to confront mortality and search for evidence of reincarnation. Some people are so precious…..have I set the scene?

Rusty lurches from one bizarre and utterly unpredictable scenario to the next, with a kind of unpretentious humour and distinctly Australian cynicism that I found simultaneously hilarious and endearing. Think Rake without the court-appearances.

Just as Rusty attempts to get his life back on track, new legislation boots his elderly, and still spectacularly dysfunctional, fraudster parents out of their respective nursing homes and into his tiny apartment. There are more twists than I thought possible, all underpinned by a dry resignation to both personal and societal failure.

A Rising of the Lights is not a classic in the traditional sense. In fact, I’d recommend reading it while it’s hot, because much of it feels tethered to the absurdities of life right now…like right now. Stay up late and make a proper start on it.

And that’s my 2 cents worth.