CLOSE TO HOME

This delightful collection brings together Alice Pung's most loved writing, on migration, family, art, belonging and identity. Warm, funny, moving and unfailingly honest, this is Alice at her best – an irresistible pleasure for fans and new readers alike.

In 2006, Alice Pung published Unpolished Gem, her award-winning memoir of growing up Chinese-Australian in Melbourne's western suburbs. It was published in the UK by Portobello and in the USA by Plume and was translated into Italian and German. Since then, she has written on everything from the role of grandparents to the corrosive effects of racism; from the importance of literature to the legacy of her parents' migration from Cambodia as asylum seekers. In all of this, a central idea is home: how the places we live and the connections we form shape who we become, and what homecoming can mean to those who build their lives in Australia.

Alice Pung is the author of the bestselling memoirs Unpolished Gem and Her Father's Daughter and the editor of the anthologies Growing Up Asian in Australia and My First Lesson. Her first novel, Laurinda, won the Ethel Turner Prize at the 2016 NSW Premier's Literary Awards. It was published to great acclaim in the USA by Knopf Children's and in the UK by Legend Press under the title Lucy & Linh and is currently in development as a feature film. Her most recent book is On John Marsden: Writers on Writers.