'A lyric celebration of the physical and spiritual endurance of two Chinese men who quest for wholeness of soul...The settings are brilliantly evoked.'  Sydney Morning Herald  'His writing is as spare and controlled, yet as eloquent, as flowing and compelling as the finest Oriental painting.'  The Australian Birds of Passage  is the vividly told, intense story of Seamus O'Young, an Australian-born Chinese who is on a collision course with his past. Shan is an ancestor of Seamus, one of many Chinese who came to Australia in the 1850s only to be driven from the goldfields by depravity, racism and greed. It is through the eyes of Shan that Seamus comes to understand the fight he is making for his own life and sanity in a society yet to come to terms with its own unease about difference and diversity.

Birds of Passage

Brian Castro

Allen& Unwin

After 40 years in Australia, Ant nio Castro packs a bag and walks out of his old life forever. The victim of a restlessness he calls "Shanghai Dancing," Ant nio seeks to understand the source of his condition in his family's wanderings. Reversing his parents' own migration, Ant nio heads back to their native Shanghai, where his world begins to fragment as his ancestry starts to flood into his present, and emissaries of glittering pre-war China, evangelical Liverpool and seventeenth-century Portugal merge into contemporary backdrops across Asia, Europe and Australia. A "fictional autobiography," Shanghai Dancing is a dazzling meditation on identity, language and disorientation that combines photographs and written images in the style of W.G. Sebald. The Age has described the book as "an extraordinary polyglot mix of sources: Portuguese, Chinese, English, Jewish and Catholic, and a mysterious recessive black gene... told in Castro's characteristically baroque prose, dense with its passion for language and serious wordplay." The winner of some of Australia's top literary prizes, Shanghai Dancing has been praised by its judges as "a work of major significance that] challenges our expectations of 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." Shanghai Dancing marks the U.S. debut of a major Australian literary figure.

Shanghai Dancing

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Giramondo Pub.

Rainbow Publishing

Australian Large Print

This book is in used very good condition.

Risks

Kim, Scott

david-brooks

Marele Day

joan-london

Gail Jones

Gillian Mears

Carmel Bird

Simone Lazaroo

John A. Scott

Brenda Walker

Sara Dowse

Fremantle Arts Center Pr

Australian edition. Text is in English. 316 pp. ISBN 1-920882-10-3

The Garden Book

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Thrillers & Suspense

Giramondo

Chinese Postman

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Books by Brian Castro