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Vendor
Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
Original language
English

THE LAST GARDEN

Eva Hornung

The settlement of Wahrheit, founded in exile to await the return of the Messiah, has been waiting longer than expected. Pastor Helfgott has begun to feel the subtle fraying of the community's faith.

Then Matthias Orion shoots his wife and himself, on the very day their son Benedict returns home from boarding school.

Benedict is unmoored by shock, severed from his past and his future. Unable to be inside the house, unable to speak, he moves into the barn with the horses and chooks, relying on the animals' strength and the rhythm of the working day to hold his shattered self together.

The pastor watches over Benedict through the year of his crazy grief: man and boy growing, each according to his own capacity, as they come to terms with the unknowable past and the frailties of being human.

Eva Hornung is an award-winning writer of literary fiction and criticism: her first novel Hiam won the Australian/Vogel Literary Award in 1997 and the Nita May Dobbie Award in 1999. Her novel The Marsh Birds won the Asher Literary Award 2005 and was shortlisted for numerous awards including the Age Book of the Year 2005, NSW Premier's Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Eva Hornung's highly acclaimed Dog Boy was shortlisted for numerous prizes and won the Prime Minister's Literary Award in 2010.
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Published 2017-05-01 by Text Publishing

Comments

Hornung is a writer of extraordinary power, using her omniscient narrator to inhabit the minds of Benedict's father, the grieving child and the faltering pastor, following the flux of their thoughts with elegance and precision An unusual and hypnotic novel.

Winner of the Premier's Award in the 2018 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature

Vivid, visceral and disconcerting. The descriptions of animals are intensely empathetic, and the book raises fundamental and confronting questions about how our animal and our human selves can or should co-exist.

Eight years after the magical, Prime Minister's Literary Award-winning Dog Boy, what a joy it is to have another beautifully-wrought novel by Adelaide author Eva Hornung.

This is an idiosyncratic book that also recalls Michael Faber's The Book of Strange New Things and John Steinbeck's The Red Pony. It will be much discussed by fans of literary fiction. Read more...

Astonishing A strange, sombre, sobering triumph.

Hornung writes with extraordinary force and insight an amazing feat of imaginative power.

Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award Read more...

Longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award