Giramondo Publishing: 33 books

Jeanne is a young woman from rural France. She’s a knight who wears men’s clothing. The English call her Joan of Arc. Jeanne has led France to victory in epic battles. She hears ghostly voices and has unspeakable desires. The English want to burn her. Her king has abandoned her. Her heart has...

Set in modern-day Mexico City, See You at Breakfast is the story of four characters, leading lives of quiet desperation, who are thrown together by a despicably violent act. Cristina is an optimistic prostitute managing work, police harassment and the demands of the men who fall in love with her such...

Landscape with Landscape is Gerald Murnane’s fourth book, after The Plains, and his first collection of short fiction. When it was first published, thirty years ago, it was cruelly reviewed. ‘I feel sorry for my fourth-eldest, which of all my book-children was the most brutally treated in its...

Tom Chos collection of fictions and fantasies is all about morphing and transformation. Through the shape-shifting, we follow the narrator on his surreal adventures, which include dirty dancing with Johnny Castle, a rambunctious encounter with TVs Dr Phil, a job as Whitney Houstons bodyguard and another...

This collection of essays leads into the eccentric imagination of Gerald Murnane, one of the masters of contemporary Australian writing.

The Bath Fugues is a meditation on melancholy and art, in the form of three interwoven novellas, centred respectively on an ageing art forger; a Portuguese poet, opium addict and art collector; and a doctor, who has built an art gallery in tropical Queensland. These characters are tied by more than...

John Hughes enters deep into the world of his imagination, giving voice to the twenty-one writers and artists who have left their traces there. In story-like essays written in the style of his heroes, the effect is like ventriloquy.

Blindness and Rage is a novel told in 34 cantos, somewhat in the manner of Pushkin’s great Russian novel in verse, Eugene Onegin. Castro’s hero Lucien Gracq is a townplanner from Adelaide who is writing a book-length poem, Paidia. Doubtful of its reception, he travels to Paris to join a literary...

This is a novel about mothers and daughters, about the way the hidden past plays itself out in the present, and the conflicts between professional commitment and the responsibilities of family life. The story is told by a young woman, Martine, who translates the emotional distance she senses in her mother,...

Explores the nature of grief and mourning, illness and separation, language and silence, and the power of vision and memory to counteract time.

Street to Street is one of Brian Castros best books yet, a comic-tragic enactment of the anxieties of the writing life, in which the early twentieth-century Sydney poet Christopher Brennan plays a major role. A legendary figure, with a commanding knowledge of classical and European poetry, Brennan wrote...

Michael’s older brother dies at the beginning of the summer he turns 15, but as its title suggests The Incredible Here and Now is a tale of wonder, not of tragedy. Presented as a series of vignettes, in the tradition of Sandra Cisneros’ Young Adult classic The House on Mango Street, it tells of...

Alis father is a Turkish circus musician performing in Kabul when Alis mother, a young pediatrician from Melbourne, meets him in a bar. He plays the trumpet, the saz, the flute, hears voices that urge him to violence, sees angels in the skies and djinns in the street, inscribes prayers and invocations...

Chi Vu takes the central figure in a traditional Buddhist folktale, a deranged killer who wears his victims’ fingers in a garland around his neck, and turns him into a menacing abbatoir worker who carries bloody chunks of meat home to his lodgings in plastic bags, in this suburban Gothic tale set in...