Shanghai Dancing wins 2004 NSW Premier's Award for Fiction and Book of the Year Award
In its sweep of history, the power of its imagination and sheer literary virtuosity, Brian Castro's Shanghai Dancing is a work of major significance.
Shanghai Dancing challenges our expectations of storytelling. Beautifully and eloquently written, Castro takes as his inspiration his own family history which encompasses a global migration from the 17th century to present day Sydney. Castro's considerable literary skills turn history into a living, evocative present, a drama in which ancestors become living characters and are so vividly imagined they illuminate for us much of the essence of the Australian story...
Castro's discursive style is robust, intelligent, radically innovative, playful, insightful and totally engrossing...Shanghai Dancing is a brave and ambitious work, but its success is in the fact that the novelist never lets the stylistic twists and turns, or the word play, the many layers of reference and allusion derail the storytelling. It is impressive as history, as fiction, as a book which stretches the literary form and which speaks to the universality of the human experience.
'a gorgeous meditation on the interaction of past and present'
Michael Sharkey, The Australian
'one of the most intelligent and original of Australian writers is again brought to mind'
Peter Pierce, The Bulletin
'Castro's eighth novel and in many ways the summa of all his work'
Laurie Clancy, The Age
'a marvellous mingling of fiction, memoir and travel writing...one of the best Australian books - or books from anywhere if it comes to that - I've read for a long time'
Andrew Riemer, Sydney Morning Herald
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