Max Reval

Literary fiction about meticulous people, the systems they trust, and the quiet ways certainty comes apart.

Australian Novelist · Literary Fiction & Thrillers

About

Max Reval is an Australian novelist. He writes restrained, precise fiction across genres: literary fiction, psychological mystery, the spy thriller and satire. He is preoccupied with control, institutions, and the quiet ways certainty comes apart.

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. Among his contemporary touchstones are Kazuo Ishiguro and Mick Herron.

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. He is a member of the Australian Society of Authors and Writing NSW.

Books

A NOVEL THE LESSER HAND MAX REVAL

The Lesser Hand

Novel · Psychological mystery · ~78,000 words

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.

For readers of Patricia Highsmith and Kazuo Ishiguro.

Seeking representation
The Right Conditions A NOVEL MAX REVAL

The Right Conditions

Novel · Literary fiction · ~59,000 words

Adrien Verdier, a contained Paris scientist of fifty-eight, goes home to Burgundy to bury his mother, and over four days the expansive, uninvited self he has not been able to summon in thirty-six years arrives, drawn out by a woman who knew them both and by the discovery that his mother carried the same intermittent self and never named it. The visitor does its quiet damage and recedes, and Adrien returns to Paris, to his wife and his lab and the life built precisely to hold the careful man. A restrained, exacting novel about inheritance, the selves we cannot perform to order, and the love that hides in what goes unsaid.

For readers of Claire Keegan and Julian Barnes.

Seeking representation
How the World Ends MAX REVAL

How the World Ends

Novel · Satire · 53,000 words

Across 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.

For readers of Kurt Vonnegut and George Saunders.

Seeking representation
LONG HORIZON · BOOK ONE The Monaro MAX REVAL

Long Horizon, Book One: The Monaro

Novel · Spy thriller · ~105,000 words

Matts Kanes (ex-SASR, 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 spy thriller about betrayal, vigilance, and a foreign operation built entirely on a misread.

For readers of John le Carré and Mick Herron.

Seeking representation
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ORA ORA CONTAINING THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO PETEY & THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO LUCKY A DIPTYCH MAX REVAL

The Gospel According to Ora

Novellas · Satire · A diptych · 22,000 + 27,000 words

A satirical diptych for the age of the feed: the Messiah returns and the Devil comes to collect, and a world that pays for nothing can recognise neither. In The Gospel According to Petey, a second coming in the Bronx is narrated by the saviour's best friend; the miracles are real, but no one's watching, until the internet finds a use for him and cancels what it can't understand. In The Gospel According to Lucky, the Devil retires to Las Vegas to buy souls the artisanal way and finds the trade automated. Nobody sells a soul on purpose any more; they just tap Accept. Contemporary social satire with a speculative-theological premise, about a world where nothing means anything because nothing costs anything.

For readers of Christopher Moore's Lamb and Good Omens.

Seeking representation

Contact

For enquiries: max@maxreval.com.au

Representation: currently seeking an agent.