Mine, by Adam Ouston, a novel length story written as one sentence

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Mine, by Adam Ouston, a novel length story written as one sentence

31 August 2026

That’s Mine, by Hobart based Australian author Adam Ouston (Instagram page), which features one incredibly, outrageously, long sentence of perhaps eighty-five thousand words. No full-stops, chapters, or even a few lines of space to break up the text it seems.

I can’t find an official word count for the novel, so made a guess. The hardback version of Mine has two-hundred-and-eighty-eight pages, and if each has perhaps three-hundred words each, then the total number of words would be well north of eighty-thousand.

Whatever the exact number, that’s one long sentence. The synopsis however perfectly suits the seemingly endless flow of words, written in stream-of-consciousness prose:

While searching for inspiration for what will be his final work, an unnamed poet and defender of Tasmania’s wild places finds himself trapped down an abandoned mine in the island’s mountain rainforests. In the darkness he is visited by memories and voices both from his own past as well as the tortured history of the pillaged landscape to which he has devoted his life and work.

That’s quite the predicament to be in. I imagine my thoughts would run into each other ceaselessly, relentlessly, were I in the same situation.

In the Margins, a glimpse into Elena Ferrante’s writing process

3 April 2022

In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing is a must read for fans of Italian author Elena Ferrante. In four essays, she writes about becoming an author, her influences, and struggles, which included developing a voice, which Johanna Thomas-Corr, writing for The Guardian, notes:

Ferrante has been acclaimed for her “singular”, “uncompromising” voice, and her “ruthless” honesty. But what emerges from the first lecture, Pain and Pen, is just how cramped and conflicted she felt trying to develop this voice. It was an agonising negotiation between a “compliant” style of writing that stayed “diligently within the margins” and a more “impetuous” approach, which allows “unexpected truth” to spill out on to the page.