Xavier Hennekinne at Paperchain

Join us at Paperchain Bookstore to hear Xavier Hennekinne, author of Unequal Loves, in conversation with Paul Hetherington.

Unequal Loves is a luminous meditation on love, memory, and the quiet devastations of time.

A middle-aged man journeys through Japan with his wife, drifting between Kyoto’s hushed temples and Tokyo’s incandescent streets, while traversing the more elusive terrain of his own restless mind. Encounters with art, literature, and fleeting strangers awaken buried desires and long-dormant regrets, pulling him into a reckoning with the ghosts of youthful passion, lost friendships, and the fragile intoxication of beauty glimpsed in passing.

With prose this is both precise and tender, Xavier Hennekinne captures the ache of nostalgia and the gravity of the present. Unequal Loves is a profound and atmospheric novel, unafraid to linger in the silences between people, the impermanence of connection, and the bittersweet shimmer of what we almost had.

‘An unsparing novel on the formative influence of desire. I felt great tenderness for the boy at the heart of the man.’
— Julia Leigh, award-winning novelist and filmmaker

Xavier Hennekinne is a French-Australian writer whose short stories and essays have appeared in literary journals worldwide. A former worker with international NGOs and the United Nations across multiple continents, he is now based in Sydney. He is the author of Unequal Loves and the illustrated novel Lost Words, and co-founder of Gazebo Books.

Paul Hetherington is a distinguished Australian writer and Emeritus Professor at the University of Canberra who lived in Western Australia for many years. His creative writing has won or been nominated for more than fifty national and international prizes and awards. His verse novel, Blood and Old Belief, was shortlisted for both the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards and the Colin Roderick Award for the best book of the year dealing with any aspect of Australian life. He is the co-founding editor of the online journal Axon: Creative Explorations and founder of International Poetry Studies at his university.

This event is free but as space is limited please book to secure your place.