Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Maren Wiederhold
Categories
Fiction & Related items

WOMEN & CHILDREN

Tony Birch

Women & Children is a novel about the love and courage between two sisters, and a sudden loss of childhood innocence.

It's 1965 and Joe Cluny is living in a working-class suburb with his mum, Marion, and sister, Ruby, spending his days trying to avoid trouble with the nuns at the local Catholic primary school. One evening his Aunty Oona appears on the doorstep, distressed and needing somewhere to stay. As his mum and aunty work out what to do, Joe comes to understand the secrets that the women in his family carry, including on their bodies. Yet their pleas for assistance are met with silence and complicity from all sides. Who will help Joe's family at their time of need?

TONY BIRCH is the author of three novels: The White Girl, winner of the 2020 NSW Premier's Award for Indigenous Writing, and shortlisted for the 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Award; Ghost River, winner of the 2016 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Indigenous Writing; and Blood, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2012. He has also published four short story collections, the most recent of which, Dark as Last Night, won both the 2022 NSW Premier's Literary Award and the Queensland Literary Award for Fiction. In 2017 he was awarded the Patrick White Literary Award. Tony Birch is an activist, historian and essayist, and is currently the Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne.

Available products
Book Published 2023-10-31 by UQP

Comments

Women & Children could be Birch's most beautiful and forthright book yet, one that speaks to the power of family to stand together in face of adversity.

Like the characters that inhabit Women & Children, Birch is a natural storyteller who makes every element work for him: plot and pace, character and dialogue, scene and setting. Across Birch's prolific output, including this latest offering, what stands out is how unhindered his language feels, how unaffected. Here is a writer who is not afraid of his words one who would rather have stories where before there was only silence.

Domestic violence, the inheritance of the Stolen Generations, class and justice are all concerns of Birch in this tender novel about families, their refusal to accept silence, and their resistance against the systems that oppress them.

This is a powerful novel that explores class, domestic violence, punishment and Australia's dark past. It's for fans of Helen Garner's laying bare of everyday Australia, Tim Winton's stories and Douglas Stuart's ability to see the world through a child's eyes.

Captivating from its opening line to its last, troubling chapter, it takes the reader into a world constructed so thoughtfully and with such simplicity that it is almost possible to miss the exceptional craft behind it.

This book is a beauty to read and will stay with you for days. The writing is elegant and understated.