Giramondo: 40 books

his is likely to be the last work by Beverley Farmer, one of Australia’s great prose stylists, and a pioneer of women’s writing, in her exploration of feminine concerns, and her use of different literary forms novel, short story, poetry, essay, journal, myth and fairy tale.This Water is a collection...

Published for the first time in English by Giramondo, Death Fugue is the bold attempt by a prominent Chinese novelist to confront the legacy of protest and suppression which haunts her generation.Sheng Keyi was born in Hunan province in 1973 and lives in Beijing. Death Fugue is her sixth novel, and the...

Journey to Horseshoe Bend was first published in 1969 and has been out of print for almost forty years. An Australian literary classic, it was written by TGH (Ted) Strehlow, author of the monumental Songs of Central Australia. It describes the final days of his father, Pastor Carl Strehlow, head of...

In the 1990s, when music was recorded on cassettes and movies on VHS, Vanessa Berry was reacting to the loneliness of life in the suburbs by constructing imaginary worlds and identities from video hits, late-night music programs, band t-shirts, mixtapes and zines, and the dark energy of the Goths. A...

Evelyn Juers’s study of reclusion focuses on Eliza Emily Donnithorne, long considered the model for Charles Dickens’s character Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. For most of her life she lived in isolation in a large house in the inner-Sydney suburb of Newtown. It was said that she had been...

The Idea of Home is a collection of five autobiographical essays, in which John Hughes reflects on growing up in the Hunter Valley coal-mining town of Cessnock, in a household ruled by memories of the Ukraine, from which his mothers family fled during the Second World War.

New book by celebrated Aboriginal author Alexis Wright, author of Carpentaria and The Swan Book.A collective memoir of one of Aboriginal Australia’s most charismatic leaders and an epic portrait of a period in the life of a country, reminiscent in its scale and intimacy of the work of Nobel Prize-winning...

The Tribe is a collection of three novellas portraying life in an extended Muslim Allawite Lebanese-Australian family, as seen by one of its youngest members. The first novella describes the family house in the Sydney suburb of Alexandria, and the three generations who live, often in some discord, in...

Brian Castros new novel is set in the Dandenong Ranges in the years between the Depression and the Second World War.

A coming-of-age story set in Angola in the period leading up to the colony’s independence, Saudade focuses on a Goan immigrant family caught between complicity in Portuguese rule, and their dependence on the Angolans who are their servants. The title (saudade means ‘melancholy’ in Portuguese)...

"Line by line, Cahill’s writing is musical, assured: cumulatively, her seriousness is evident, her ambition impressive." - Hilary MantelLetter to Pessoa is the first collection of short stories by award-winning Goan-Australian poet Michelle Cahill. It is an imaginative tour de force, portraying...

The new novel by Alexis Wright, whose previous novel Carpentaria won the Miles Franklin Award and four other major prizes including the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year Award. The Swan Book is set in the future, with Aboriginals still living under the Intervention in the north, in an...

The Burning Elephant is set in Kolkata before and after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, which led to widespread violence against India’s Sikh population. The novel is told from the point of view of a young boy Govinda, whose father is the headmaster of a local school. It begins with the intrusion...

During the Cultural Revolution over 14 million Chinese high school graduates were sent from the cities to live and work in the countryside. They were known as zhiqing ‘educated youth’. They fell in love, married, had children. In the late 1970s the policy changed and they were allowed to return,...