Please join us for a celebration of Chinese Postman, the new novel out this October by one of Australia’s most important writers, Brian Castro.

Chinese Postman will be launched by Lynda Ng on Thursday 14 November at the Crystal Palace & Courtyard in Carlton North.

Copies of the book will be available for purchase on the night through Readings Books, with light refreshments provided.

This event is free, but RSVP is essential as space is limited. Please register on this page as soon as possible to avoid missing out.

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EVENT DETAILS

Date: Thursday 14 November
Time: 6pm for a 6.30pm start
Location: Crystal Palace & Courtyard
Cost: Free, RSVP essential

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ABOUT CHINESE POSTMAN

Abraham Quin is in his mid-seventies, a migrant, thrice-divorced, a one-time postman and professor, a writer now living alone in the Adelaide Hills. In Chinese Postman he reflects on his life with what he calls ‘the mannered and meditative inaction of age’, offering up memories and anxieties, obsessions and opinions, his thoughts on solitude, writing, friendship and time. He ranges widely, with curiosity and feeling, digressing and changing direction as suits his experience, and his role as a collector of fragments and a surveyor of ruins. He becomes increasingly engaged in an epistolary correspondence with Iryna Zarebina, a woman seeking refuge from the war in Ukraine.

As the correspondence opens him to others, the elaboration of his memories tempers his melancholy with a playful enjoyment in the richness of language, and a renewed appreciation of the small events in nature. This understanding of the experience of old age is something new and important in our literature. As Quin comments, ‘In Australia, the old made way for the young. It guaranteed a juvenile legacy.’

Order the book.

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ABOUT BRIAN CASTRO

Brian Castro was born in Hong Kong of Portuguese, Chinese and English parentage. He is the author of ten novels, including Birds Of Passage, Double-Wolf, After China, Stepper, Shanghai Dancing, The Garden Book, and Blindness and Rage. He has won The Age Book of the Year Award, the Victorian Premier’s Award (three times), the National Book Council Award, the NSW Premier’s Award and the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award and the Prime Minister’s Prize for Poetry. In 2014 Castro received the Patrick White Award in recognition of his significant contribution to Australian literature. His new book, Chinese Postman, will be released by Giramondo in October 2024.

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ABOUT LYNDA NG

Lynda Ng is a Lecturer in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne. She is the editor of Indigenous Transnationalism: Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2018), the recipient of an ARC Discovery Grant for a collaborative project on J. M. Coetzee and was awarded the Margaret Church Memorial Prize for the best essay published in MFS: Modern Fiction Studies.

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