Gilgamesh

Literature & Fiction

joan-london

Literary

Random House Australia

The New Dark Age

The Good Parents

The Golden Age

Vintage Australia

Vintage

<p>An intimate portrait of the noted writer, as seen through the eyes of his daughter, captures childhood memories and the sorrow of an absent father</p>

Jack London and His Daughters

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Heyday Books

A two-time winner of Australia's prestigious The Age Book of the Year Award, Joan London's debut novel, Gilgamesh, was published to rapturous acclaim both in her native Australia and in the United States. Now, London has delivered The Good Parents, a tender and compelling tale of mother love and the harrowing moment when a daughter spreads her wings and vanishes from her parents' orbit. Maya de Jong is an 18-year-old country girl who moves to Melbourne and begins an affair with her new boss. When Maya's parents, Toni and Jacob, arrive for a visit, Maya is gone—no one knows where. Maya, for reasons of her own, leaves haunting clues in late-night calls to her brother at home, carefully avoiding detection by the two people who love her most. Ultimately, to find her daughter, Toni will have to revisit a part of her past that she thought she had shut off forever—the closest she ever came to being a lost girl herself. The Good Parents is at once utterly contemporary and a story as old as humanity itself: a stunning portrait of familial love and how far we can drift apart in the moments between the words we speak.

Good Parents, The

Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio

Edith and Frances, living with their mother on a tiny farm in the south-east of Australia, are visited by their cousin Leopold and his Armenian friend Aram. The two young men are taking the long way home after working on an archaeological dig in Iraq. It is 1937. The modern world they say, is waiting to erupt. Among the tales they tell is the story of Gilgamesh, the legendary king of Uruk, in ancient Mesopotamia. Gilgamesh's great journey of mourning after the death of his friend Enkidu, and his search for the secret of eternal life, is to resonate through all of their lives. In 1939 Edith and her young child set off on an impossible journey of their own, to find themselves trapped by the outbreak of war. The story of this journey is the story of encounters and escapes, of friendship and love, of loss and acceptance.

ATLANTIC BOOKS *

From the author of "Gilgamesh" - long listed for the Orange Prize - comes "The Good Parents", a tale of loss and longing that gets right to the heart of the struggle to do good and be good whilst trying to find a place to belong. Maya de Jong, an eighteen-year-old country girl from the West, comes to live in Melbourne and starts an affair with her boss, the enigmatic Maynard Flynn, whose wife is dying of cancer. When Maya's parents, Toni and Jacob, arrive to stay with her, they are told by her house mate that Maya has gone away and no one knows where she is. As Toni and Jacob wait and search for Maya in Melbourne, everything in their lives is brought into question. They recall the yearning and dreams, the betrayals and choices of their pasts - choices with unexpected and irrevocable consequences. With Maya's disappearance, the lives of all those close to her come into focus, to reveal the complexity of the ties that bind us to one another, to parents, children, siblings, friends and lovers. Pacy and enthralling, "The Good Parents" is at once a vision of contemporary life and a story as old as fairy tales: that of a runaway girl.

THE GOOD PARENTS

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