Arnold Zable: 7 books

Henry Nissen was a champion boxer, the boy from Amess Street in working-class Carlton who fought his way up to beat some of the world’s best in the 1970s. Now, he works on the Melbourne docks, loading and unloading, taking shifts as they come up. But his real work is on the streets. He’s in and...

Arnold Zable takes the reader on an intimate journey into the lives of people he met on travels over the last forty years. These are tales aching to be told. Tales of hardship, of yearning and of celebration. From the songs of Arab diva Umm Khultum on the banks of the Tigris to the strains...

The Fig Tree is a tender book of true stories about family, about journeys, about home. Arnold Zable, bestselling author of Cafe Scheherazade, describes remarkable people struggling through tragic times and rejoicing in the unexpectedness of life itself. Zable writes with wonderful feeling...

The island of Homer's Odyssey has beguiled readers for millennia. Master storyteller Arnold Zable takes us to modern-day Ithaca, to its mountains, its villages and its harbours, and into the houses of its people. Xanthe is drawn to Ithaca, the birthplace of her father Manoli and her maternal...

‘Do you ever think about those you left behind?’, I ask father. ‘Not often’, he says. ‘Such memories are a luxury I can’t afford.’ First his parents made a journey to the New World. It was the 1930s, and Europe was seething. As he grew up, Arnold Zable heard tales, songs,...

It's 1958 and Australia is becoming a different place. The Melbourne working-class suburb of Carlton is now home to many immigrant families trying to begin new lives and make sense of the old. Romek and Zofia, liberated from the camps in Poland, work hard at the local market, but their love...

Cafe Scheherazade is a haunting meditation on displacement, and the way the effects of war linger in the minds of its survivors. In this deeply moving book we meet Avram and Masha, proprietors of the cafe, and hear the tales that they and their fellow storytellers have to offer: of Moshe stalking...