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The Garden Book

324 pages
Paperback, 21 x 14.8 cm
Published August 2005
ISBN 1920882103

The Garden Book

Brian Castro

Winner, Queensland Premier's Award

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

The story revolves around Swan Hay, born Shuang He, daughter of a country schoolteacher, her marriage to the passionate and brutal Darcy Damon, and her love affair with the aviator and architect Jasper Zenlin. Fifty years after her disappearance, Norman Shih, a rare book librarian, pieces together Swan’s chaotic life from clues found in guest house libraries, antiquarian bookshops and her own elusive writings. But what exactly is his relationship to her?

The Garden Book is about loneliness, addiction, exploitation; it is about the precarious nature of Australian lives, when gripped by fear and racial prejudice. Yet underlying the story, and commanding it, there is the assured beat of Castro’s prose, evoking an ideal world beyond these fears, full of richness and power.

About the Author

Brian Castro

Brian Castro is the author of the prize-winning Australian classic Shanghai Dancing, and recipient of the 2014 Patrick White Literary Award. His novels include The Garden Book and The Bath Fugues, both shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and Street to Street, loosely based on the life of the poet Christopher Brennan. His most recent work, a verse novel titled Blindness and Rage, won the 2018 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry and the Mascara Avant-garde Award for Fiction.

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Reviews

…one of the most exacting, yet rewarding of Australian novelists, and when the mood is on him, one of the most amusing as well.

Peter Pierce, The Age

Awards

Winner, 2006 Queensland Premier’s Award for Fiction