Krank Fuss
Andrew Upton
Puncher & Wattmann, 2026
Andrew Upton, long known to Sydney audiences as a playwright and former artistic director of the Sydney Theatre Company, makes an assured debut as a novelist with Krank Fuss.
A son transcribes a manuscript left by his late grandfather, written on a German small farm on the eve of the Second World War. Within it, a chicken with a deformed foot, Krank Fuss, ‘sick foot’, is ostracised by her flock and befriends Gibby, a toad who insists it is a frog. Together they journey through the farm as the wider world edges toward catastrophe.
The echoes of Animal Farm are clear but the spirit is closer to Camus’s The Plague: this is a story about the loss of innocence, rather than illusion. Krank Fuss doesn’t end up wise exactly but she keeps her hope, which feels like the harder-won, more honest outcome. There’s also something of Jean de La Fontaine here, in the way animal fable is used to smuggle in moral and social observation without ever tipping into simple allegory.
The writing is often lyrical: the moment Krank Fuss learns to look up rather than down, and finds a sky above her, is quietly beautiful, alongside flashes of imagery genuinely terrifying enough to linger after the last page.
The rats function as this book’s pigs, complicit and self-serving rather than simply villainous. Upton is sharpest on the farmers, who drift into neglecting the flock’s welfare and then blame a convenient scapegoat, the fox, while the real bullies, an ageing rooster and the rats, go unnoticed.
Line drawings punctuate the text, sometimes striking, occasionally a little flat. Despite this minor reservation, this is a powerful first novel.
