The Patron Saint of Eels by Gregory Day
Author: Martine Lleonart
Publisher:
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 12
ISBN-13:
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The Patron Saint of Eels
Author: Gregory Day
Publisher: Picador Australia
Published: 2015-06-19
Total Pages: 204
ISBN-13: 1743540019
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWinner of the Patrick White Literary Award A contemporary fable, this book shows that when life seems dull and cruel it is the power of the natural world, and our ability to imagine it, that can bring the wonder back into living. In the southern Italian village of Stellanuova, in the 1700s, a Franciscan monk, Fra Ionio, becomes known as the Patron Saint of Eels when he brings a distraught fisherman's yearly catch of eels back from the dead in the village market. When Stellanuova's inhabitants emigrate to Australia in the post World War II migrations of the 1940s, 50s and 60s, the immortal saint is left looking down on an abandoned town. To fulfil his calling, he decides in heaven to migrate with his countrymen and now looks down on the state of Victoria, where he intercedes in matters relating to eels. In the southern Victorian town of Mangowak, Noel Lea lives with the melancholy inheritance of a place undergoing the gentrifications of contemporary Australia. Along with his oldest friend, Nanette Burns, he longs for a time when life was less complex and unexpected magic seemed to permeate the ocean town and its people. When spring rains flood a nearby swamp and hundreds of eels get trapped in the grassy ditches around Noel's family home, he and Nanette encounter the vibrant Fra Ionio and get more magic than they bargained for. A beautifully written, charming and evocative book by Gregory Day, who also authored Trace, in collaboration with photographer, Robert Ashton.
Ron McCoy's Sea of Diamonds
Author: Gregory Day
Publisher: Picador Australia
Published: 2008-07-01
Total Pages: 324
ISBN-13: 1741980445
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWinner of the Patrick White Literary Award On the wild clifftop of the coastal town of Mangowak, Ron McCoy lives an almost marsupial existence with his elderly mother. He hunts and gathers while the town sleeps; he is acutely shy, but in the privacy of his imagination, fostered as it is by his love of music and the oceanscape of his birth, all things are possible. Liz and Craig Wilson, meanwhile, are lovers of the surf and the bush. When Craig is offered a job by Colin Batty, Mangowak's larrikin real estate agent, the dream of bringing up their kids away from the city is finally realised. But working for Batty Real Estate is not as simple as it seems. The surrounding landscape is full of alchemic power and mystery and when Ron McCoy and his mother decide to sell half their land, the subtle generational differences between young and old Australia begin to swirl. Written in a precise, painterly style, Gregory Day's follow-up to his award-winning debut novel, The Patron Saint of Eels, is a powerful meditation on belonging, on landscape, and on love.
Words Are Eagles
Author: Gregory Day
Publisher: Upswell
Published: 2022-07-05
Total Pages: 333
ISBN-13: 1743822502
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA collection of beautiful and moving essays on the wonder of the natural world and the cultural complexities of writing landscape in Australia Words are Eagles collects in one place the essays of award-winning novelist and nature writer, Gregory Day. Grounded in the landscape of southwestern Victoria, and infused with the heightened sense of place and environmental literacy that have long been key to Day's work, these essays traverse landscape, language and histories. Day's attention is tuned both to beauty of the natural world, returning often to the motifs of ground and sky, ocean and owl, moth and river, and the history of place - whether lost, buried or personal. In a part a reading and celebration of the resurgent global nature writing movement, to which Day was an early contributor, this collection highlights the need for ecological care and value of Indigenous knowledge and practices. This is the kind of nature writing that gets to the heart of our urgent need for a more harmonious and regenerative relationship with the earth that sustains us
After The Celebration
Author: Ken Gelder
Publisher: Melbourne Univ. Publishing
Published: 2009-01-01
Total Pages: 296
ISBN-13: 9780522859218
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAfter the Celebration explores Australian fiction from 1989 to 2007, after Australia's bicentenary to the end of the Howard government. In this literary history, Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman combine close attention to Australian novels with a vivid depiction of their contexts: cultural, social, political, historical, national and transnational. From crime fiction to the postmodern colonial novel, from Australian grunge to 'rural apocalypse fiction', from the Asian diasporic novel to the action blockbuster, Gelder and Salzman show how Australian novelists such as Frank Moorhouse, Elizabeth Jolley, Peter Carey, Kim Scott, Steven Carroll, Kate Grenville, Tim Winton, Alexis Wright and many others have used their work to chart our position in the world. The literary controversies over history, identity, feminism and gatekeeping are read against the politics of the day. Provocative and compelling, After the Celebration captures the key themes and issues in Australian fiction: where we have been and what we have become.
The Postie and The Priest
Author: Ron Burrows
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2013-08-09
Total Pages: 375
ISBN-13: 1625643314
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA priest, a postie, a parish, a suburb, a city, a diocese, an unusual and deep friendship, a struggle to get a book published The Postie and the Priest is part biography, part philosophy, part social commentary, part theological reflection. Here is a fl y-on-the-wall account of the daily life of an iconic Melbourne priest who has a deep passion for the battlers of his city, written by his postman who began by delivering his letters and ended up recording his life story. The stories from Fr Bob Maguire's life recall family events, life in the seminary, time as an army chaplain, work in various parishes, media connections and above all, his passion for the organisations he founded -Open Family and the Fr Bob Maguire Foundation - that give voice to his concern for the underprivileged and the homeless of Melbourne. The postie admires the priest and tells his story but this is as much the postie's story, giving us a unique insight into the history, characters and streets of South Melbourne that have shaped the lives of both men.
The Moth Mass
Author: Gregory Day
Publisher: Random House Australia
Published: 2013-03-01
Total Pages: 12
ISBN-13: 0857980718
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn original story from the author of The Grand Hotel Rural Victoria 1865, the heat comes in and all the signs of the next drought on its way. At times like these no one seems to mind putting on their best clothes and making the long journey to the cool, bluestone church on a Sunday morning. but it is not only humans seeking shelter and solace on this Sunday morning.
The Bell of the World
Author: Gregory Day
Publisher: Transit Lounge
Published: 2023-03-01
Total Pages: 368
ISBN-13: 0645565350
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhen a troubled Sarah Hutchinson returns to Australia from boarding school in England and time spent in Europe, she is sent to live with her eccentric Uncle Ferny on the family property, Ngangahook. With the sound of the ocean surrounding everything they do on the farm, Sarah and her uncle form an inspired bond hosting visiting field naturalists and holding soirees in which Sarah performs on a piano whose sound she has altered with items and objects from the bush and shore. As Sarah’s world is nourished by music and poetry, Ferny’s life is marked by Such is Life, a book he has read and reread, so much so that the volume is falling apart. Its saviour is Jones the Bookbinder of Moolap, who performs a miraculous act. To shock and surprise, Jones interleaves Ferny’s volume with a book he bought from an American sailor, a once obscure tale of whales and the sea. In art as in life nature seems supreme. Ngangahook and its environs are threatened, however, when members of the community ask the Hutchinsons to help ‘make a savage landscape sacred’ by financing the installation of a town bell. The fearless musician and her idealistic uncle refuse to buckle to local pressures, mounting their own defence of ‘the bell of the world’. Gregory Day’s new novel embodies a cultural reckoning in a breathtakingly beautiful and lyrical way. The Bell of the World is both a song to the natural wonders that are not yet gone and a luminous prehistory of contemporary climate change and its connection to colonialism. It is a book immersed in the early to mid-twentieth century but written very much for the hearts of the future. ‘The Bell of the World is regionalist and universal, historical and timeless, beautiful and brutal. It is an urgent call for us not to speak but to listen, so that we might find our place, both here in Australia and on the Earth.’ – Maria Takolander
The Grand Hotel
Author: Gregory Day
Publisher: Random House Australia
Published: 2010-07-01
Total Pages: 445
ISBN-13: 1742740081
DOWNLOAD EBOOKStrange things are happening at the Grand Hotel... 'A hotel as a work of art in little ol' Mangowak? It was about as unlikely as an indoor creek.' Robbed of his zest for life by the absurd innovations of his local council, including knocking down the only pub in his beloved home town and roofing over a section of the creek to protect swimmers from the rain, artist Noel Lea exiles himself in the hills above Mangowak, on the southwest Victorian coast. He returns to find an unexpected destiny awaits. At a turning point in the town's history it seems he has a crucial role to play, as the unlikely publican of an even unlikelier hotel. This is a novel about an Australian pub twenty-first-century style, where the toilets play automated Dadaist recordings, Happy Hour comes with a blessing from the Pope and the patrons' libidos are as voracious as their thirst for the local ale. As events in the hotel take a twist that not even its inventive publican could have imagined, a long-held local mystery begins finally to unravel. Noel and his friends find themselves in uncharted territory, and, to make matters worse, the local authorities are hell-bent on closing them down. From the award-winning author of The Patron Saint of Eels and Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds, Gregory Day's third novel is a witty, earthy and lyrical tour de force that takes some well-aimed swipes at the aspirations and absurdities of contemporary life.
Ron McCoy's Sea of Diamonds
Author: Gregory Day
Publisher: Picador Australia
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 324
ISBN-13: 9780330423328
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOn the wild clifftop of the coastal town of Mangowak, Ron McCoy lives an almost marsupial existence with his elderly mother. He hunts and gathers while the town sleeps; he is acutely shy, but in the privacy of his imagination, fostered as it is by his love of music and the oceanscape of his birth, all things are possible.Liz and Craig Wilson, meanwhile, are lovers of the surf and the bush. When Craig is offered a job by Colin Batty, Mangowak's larrikin real estate agent, the dream of bringing up their kids away from the city is finally realised.But working for Batty Real Estate is not as simple as it seems. The surrounding landscape is full of alchemic power and mystery and when Ron McCoy and his mother decide to sell half their land, the subtle generational differences between young and old Australia begin to swirl.Written in a precise, painterly style, Gregory Day's follow-up to his award-winning debut novel, The Patron Saint of Eels, is a powerful meditation on belonging, on landscape, and on love.
